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Thoughts On The Passing Of Christopher Hitchens (KingShamus)

A few rather tardy reflections on the loss of a great public figure.

First, here is Vanity Fair’s memoriam.

Christopher Hitchens—the incomparable critic, masterful rhetorician, fiery wit, and fearless bon vivant—died today at the age of 62. Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in the spring of 2010, just after the publication of his memoir, Hitch-22 and began chemotherapy soon after. His matchless prose has appeared in Vanity Fair since 1992, when he was named contributing editor.

“Cancer victimhood contains a permanent temptation to be self-centered and even solipsistic,” Hitchens wrote nearly a year ago in Vanity Fair, but his own final labors were
anything but: in the last 12 months, he produced for this magazine a piece on U.S.-Pakistani relations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death, a portrait of Joan Didion, an essay on the Private Eye retrospective at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a prediction
about the future of democracy in Egypt, a meditation on the legacy of progressivism in Wisconsin, and a series of frank, graceful, and exquisitely written essays in which he chronicled the physical and spiritual effects of his disease. At the end, Hitchens was more engaged, relentless, hilarious, observant, and intelligent than just about everyone else—just as he had been for the last four decades.

“My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends,” he wrote in the June 2011 issue. He died in their presence, too, at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas. May his 62 years of living, well, so livingly console the many of us who will miss him dearly.

I was reading Ace’s remembrance of Hitch. Like Andrew Breitbart, I peruse Ace’s comments section almost as much as I read the posts themselves. Most commenters were respectful and more than a few were quite mournful of the loss of Mr. Hitchens. As the comments piled up, another train of thought developed, which could be characterized as the ‘Hooray, The Mouthy Atheist Gets His Comeuppance Sack Dance’. Several commenters, who identified themselves as Christians, seemed to revel in the fact that Hitchens would be damned for his atheism.

Tacky? Definitely.

An un-Christian response to the death of a human being? Surely.

But then again, what was the grand project of Christopher Hitchens’ life over the last decade? For many people–especially those not familiar with his stance on Islamic radicalism, his disgust for President Bill Clinton or his slow drift away from the political left–Hitch was best known as the public face of atheism. And it’s not like he was particularly gentle about his dislike for religious faith. No, he was a loud-n-proud attack dog for the anti-God side.

It isn’t all that shocking to find that many Christians grew tired of Hitchens’ snarling barely contained disdain for them. Believers are instructed to turn the other cheek and pray for their enemies, but believers are still human after all. Even the most patient Christian will chafe at having his beliefs trampled on over and over again. This is especially true when the trampler in question never bothers to wipe off his boots before stepping on his intended target. Hitchens’ brand of atheism was pointed, angry and more often than not insulting. When he railed against the Church or other religious institutions, it seemed as if his aim was not to change minds but to injure people he perceived as enemies.

In America and the West, Christians have endured decades of writers, entertainers, artists, intellectuals and other taste-makers who attempted to shame believers out of their faith. For many, Hitchens was simply the latest in a long line of pompous know-it-alls trying to make them feel stupid for taking the words of the Bible to heart. Seen in that light, it’s more surprising just how few Christians have piled on in the wake of Hitchens’ passing.

Beyond the question of religion, Christopher Hitchens was a writer that reveled in the act of making ideological allies uncomfortable. Since the time of Clinton’s impeachment, Hitchens was seen by many on the Left as a traitor to the cause. For the audacity of going against American liberalism’s champion, Hitch was vilified by the kind of people who had spent decades using him as an ideological buttress to hold up their arguments.

For many progressives, the final straw was Hitchens’ continuous defense of the Iraq War. The idea of Hitch making friends with the likes of Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush was simply too much for many committed leftists to tolerate. The excommunication of Hitchens from the socialist project was all but complete by 2004.

Even as the intellectual Left was ejecting a former comrade from their midst, Hitchens simply wouldn’t or couldn’t play nice in the sandbox with the Right either. Besides his utter hatred for organized religion he made sure to slam other facets of the broad traditionalist caucus. Sarah Palin got no love from Hitch. Neither did the Tea Party; Hitch accused the movement of racial bigotry whenever asked about it. Ronald Reagan, one of conservatism’s great political heroes, was worse than useless in the writer’s judgment.

How much of Hitchens’ argumentative rhetoric came from honest disagreement? How much of it was mere posturing? Sometimes it was hard to tell. The joy Hitchens seemed to take in making people squirm suggests that a good deal of his personality was a well-rehearsed form of contrarianism. This isn’t always so bad; there are far worse sins for a writer than being against the prevailing attitudes of his time.

Still, watch the clip and note how Hitchens goes after Reagan. From our vantage point in the Age of Trillion Dollar Obama, 90’s-era lefty critiques of Reagan’s budget deficits seem ridiculously quaint. More absurd is the sight of a man who at the time still considered himself a member of the socialist movement using national debt as a focus for his attack on the 40^th president. For a polemicist who launched into countless tirades denouncing the hypocrisy of his various hate-figures, the grasping for this particular club to bash this particular target is just the sort of cynical opportunism Hitchens made a career out of railing against.

But what a career. To say Christopher Hitchens had a gift for writing is like saying that Lady Gaga has a passing interest in publicity. Even when you found yourself disagreeing with him, he was still far more interesting than most political writers are on their best days. Hitchens was a master of fusing his thunderous moralism to a seemingly effortless ability to create provocative imagery. For this alone, he will be missed by writers and readers across the globe.

But it wasn’t just his writing that made him great. His public persona, an improbable amalgamation of a priapic boozed-up British university student and a joyfully overfed bookworm, made him a joy to watch in a public debate. It was also that improbable mixture that was so surprising. A nicotine-fueled drunk nattering on in a cartoonish plummy Oxbridge accent about Cold War-era Eastern European leftists or some other historical obscurity should not be compelling, yet somehow Hitchens made it work. It’s possible that only he could’ve done pulled off that feat.

For this conservative, it was most enjoyable seeing Hitchens crack on his former leftist pals. Watch and laugh as Hitch eviscerates knee-jerk liberal Eric Alterman’s anti-Iraq War arguments. What comes across most clearly from the clip is the sense that Alterman could not—even at such a late hour--relinquish his lingering hurt over Hitchens’ defection from the liberal sphere. Even as Hitchens piles injury upon injury, Alterman still pines for Hitch to come back to liberal side of the aisle. The barely concealed passive aggression from Alterman gives the game away.

Sometimes a man is defined by his enemies. In many ways, Hitchens was defined by the old comrades he had pissed off over the course of his meandering exit from the progressive movement. The resentment still remains, even after a decade. Repellent lefty shrew Katha Pollitt took the occasion of Hitch’s passing to settle some bitter old scores with her former colleague. Kevin Drum damned himself by damning Hitchens with faint insult. Dave Zirin spun a chance barroom dust-up with Hitch into a comically melodramatic confrontation, complete with a bizarre slapdash amateur psychoanalysis of Hitchens to boot.

Again and again, one is faced with a rather startling revelation: The Left needed Christopher Hitchens far more than he ever needed them. They craved his stylish prose, his combativeness and his intellectual curiosity. More importantly, liberals desperately wanted to be able to claim Hitchens as theirs alone. When Hitch started palling around with liberalism’s enemies, it devastated the
socialists--as it does still today.

Was Christopher Hitchens a right-winger, as his many progressive critics accused him of being? Surely not. William F. Buckley once said that an atheist could be a conservative, but a God-hater could not. Hitchens’ disgust for organized religion alone will probably always deny him entry into the conservative caucus. His various other heterodoxies from traditionalism make considering him a man of the Right impossible.

However, measuring Hitchens by this yardstick is unfair. The man loved his eccentricities more than being a rigid partisan. It was his sort of scattered unpredictable politics, the kind that infuriated both friends and enemies alike, that made him interesting. To complain about Hitchens’ lack of ideological
‘correctness’ misses the point. Hitch forced everyone who read him to question their own assumptions, even for just a moment. During a career that spanned several periods of ideological inflexibility, Hitchens' ability to break through convention is the greatest gift he could give to his readers.

Hitch would agree with the sentiment that the world is a far better place with people like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden dead. Conversely, the world is a far better place for having Christopher Hitchens live in it for sixty-two years.

RIP

September 11th, 2001--A Decade of Greiving and War Intertwined (KingShamus)

On September 11th 2001, ordinary Americans were caught in the horror of al-Qaeda's monstrous sadism.  The victims of the 9/11 attacks were a more or less random sampling of people from a broad spectrum of life in the States.  While none of them could've known that they would be murdered by pure human evil that day, many men and women rose up and became America's first heroes in the war against radical Islam.

One of them was Betty Ong.

The 45-year-old flight attendant was on American Airline Flight 11, the first of two that crashed into the World Trade Center. During the hijacking, Ong hid in the back galley, picked up a crew phone and bravely called the airline reservation desk.

"The cockpit is not answering their phone," Ong said during the hijacking. "There's somebody stabbed in business class and we can't breathe...somebody's got mace or something."

The call lasted 23 minutes. Ong spoke calmly, giving important details of the chaotic last moments.

The 9/11 Commission declared Ong a hero.

Indeed.

Here is the phone call she placed--in the midst of the hijacking, with murder surrounding her and in danger of being killed by terrorists--telling authorities what was happening on her flight.

 

And then this valiant woman was gone.

What did the 9/11 attacks cost us?  We can talk about the trillion dollars that simply evaporated from the American economy in a single morning.  The destruction of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was meant to be a symbolic demolition of the United States' economic and military dominance.  But as important as these things are, they pale in comparison to the human price America paid on that day. 

Think about the hopes and dreams of the three thousand people who died on that day.  What did Betty Ong want for her life?  Was she saving for a house or new car?  Did she want to get married?  Were children in her plans?  Did she have career aspirations? These are questions that seem so banal, at least for the living.  Tragically, they cannot be answered when it comes to Ms. Ong--or anyone else who died because of Osama bin Laden's perverse ideology. 

Three thousand people are no longer with us, which means three thousand sets of families and friends were victimized on September 11th.  Those people who had a connection to the 9/11 victims not only had a part of their lives ripped away from them, but they had a part of their future destroyed as well; the weddings that didn't happen, the children that won't be born, the birthdays that have become a time of mourning.  When seen from that perspective, the 9/11 attacks take on an almost unthinkably barbaric and inhuman dimension.

It was Osama bin Laden and his followers who decided to make war against us in this fashion.  It was bin Laden, one of the most extreme adherents of a religion that has trouble reconciling itself to democracy, human rights, free market economics and the rest of modern civilization, that elected to use large scale terrorism on the United States.  America did not seek out this fight.  The fight was brought right into our home.  We had no choice but to bring war upon bin Laden and all those that would stand with him.  We have no choice but to continue to fight against all who follow in al-Qaeda's path. 

On this day, we should mourn.  We should mourn for those who had loved ones taken from them.  We should mourn for our country and all that it lost on that day.  But we should also celebrate the men and women that gave their lives in order to save us.  We almost never think of our neighbors and coworkers as potential heroes.  As it turns out, the 9/11 attacks showed us that America is full of people who will rise in the face of unimaginable danger to help others. 

At one of the darkest moments in this country's history, there were many like Betty Ong who put themselves in harm's way in order to do the right thing.  During the worst attack on America's soil, there were citizens that sacrificed their own lives in order to save the lives of others.  These folks were not sports icons, blowhard politicians or members of the celebrity class.  Our fallen 9/11 heroes were in fact ordinary Americans who were placed into unspeakable situations and performed extraordinary feats of selfless bravery.

On this day of sadness and pain, we should leave some room in our hearts for wonder.  Hopefully we never stop marvelling at the feats of our fallen champions from September 11th.  The valorous dead deserves our remembrance and our reverence.  We owe them far more than we can ever repay.

Update I:  Robert Stacy McCain shares his rememberences of 9/11.  He also knows who the real enemy is. 

Update II:  Manhattan Infidel posts a poignant piece about his 9/11.  The Infidel speaks a hard but necessary truth:

What happened that day makes me angry. It still makes me angry. To call Islam Medieval is an insult to the middle ages. Islam is pre-medieval. It is stone age. It is barbaric.

Read the whole thing.

Update III:  Karen Howes of the terrific Eastern Right has this to say:

May we always continue to be Americans.

Amen, Karen.  Amen.

Update IV:  Matt of the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts about American unity. 

Update V:  Chris Wysocki of WyBlog reminds us that we still need patriots.

Update VI:  Edge of the Sandbox is annoyed at Muslim imams getting invited to places they don't really belong.  Preach on, sister.

Update VII:  The Crack Emcee gives us the enduring strength of George W. Bush.  He kept us safe and we ended up hating him for it.

Update VIII:  David Wong of Cracked.com tells the story of how "Loose Change" poisoned the 9/11 tragedy.

Update IX:  Right Hand Man of the superb Sentry Journal talks about heart.

Update X:  Angel of Woman Honor Thyself honors those taken from us on 9/11 with a heart-wrenching piece.

Update XI:  CG Hill takes a look at his September 13th 2001 reaction and fisks it.

Obama's Gameplan and Republican Options (KingShamus)

Remember when President Obama said this?

The top congressional leaders from both parties gathered at the White House for a working discussion over the shape and size of President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus plan. The meeting was designed to promote bipartisanship.

But Obama showed that in an ideological debate, he’s not averse to using a jab.

Challenged by one Republican senator over the contents of the package, the new president, according to participants, replied: “I won.”

As a statement of fact, the Bamster was of course correct. He did win the 2008 presidential election in very handy fashion. John McCain was a lousy candidate, but that doesn't change the fact that 52% of the public pulled the HopeyChangey lever.

As it relates to the contemporary fight over the debt ceiling, Obama's 2009 triumphalism represents just how badly the President misread the circumstances that swept him into power. Candidate Barry ran as an aspirational post-partisan Lightbringer. He was going to change the country's imperial posture on the world stage and reverse the damage done to the US's reputation by the American warlord Premier Bush. International intellectual elites, formerly hostile governments, hardcore terrorists; all would fall for Barack Obama's apologies for past American misbehavior and his sophisticated charisma.

On the home front, an Obama presidency was advertised as an even-keeled moderate administration that would stand athwart the ideological poles of American politics cooing, "Let's Be Nice." President Pantscrease (thanks again, David Brooks!) wasn't going to give in to the extremes of the Republican Party hacks of course, but he also wasn't going to let Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi define his political agenda either. Sure, there would be some new spending, but nothing crazy. Yes, there were going to be some tax hikes, but only on the really rich people.

A conciliatory anti-Dubya abroad and a pragmatic centrist in the domestic sphere: this is the Barack Obama many Americans voted for in 2008.

In 2011 we find ourselves sifting through the wreckage of Obama's presidency. All the ridiculous spending with absolutely nothing to show for it, all the bloated Leviathan government programs passed against the public's will, all the ludicrous domestic decisions that have damn near annihilated the private sector, all the random wars started with little public explanation and even fewer plans for victory; all of these things and more were borne out of Barack Obama's self-delusion. This arrogant ideologically-blinkered talentless achievement-free hack of a man, with decades of politically correct college campus leftism crammed into his thick Ivy League skull, actually thought that just because he snookered some folks into believing his factless self-description he could govern like the Marxoid rabble-rouser he actually is.

Better still, Barack Obama wants John Boehner and the rest of the GOP--you know, the folks who won last November--to make the exact same mistake he did back in 2009. In the budget ceiling battle going on, the President needs Speaker Boehner far more than he probably ever thought he would. In fact, Obama's chances for pulling a victory out of this (and saving his re-election bacon) rest on John Boehner's forgetting the reason why people voted for the GOP in the midterm elections.

Related: Let's look at the grand agreement that Obama wants and needs Boehner to approve. The Democrats get the Republicans to stop hammering them about profligate spending. In exchange for that, the GOP gets what exactly?

...the president and his allies are playing a familiar card. It’s not that they are against entitlement “reform,” they say, it’s just that they want to protect the beneficiaries from any financial sacrifice. And so we learn in recent days (see here and here) that Democrats are willing to put sizeable Medicare and Medicaid “cuts” on the table. Among the changes that are reportedly under consideration are further reductions in what providers of services and products are paid, trims in Medicare’s support of hospital-based physician-training programs, and importation of Medicaid’s pharmaceutical-rebate scheme into the Medicare
prescription-drug benefit for the so-called “dually eligible” (that is, the elderly who are enrolled in both programs). And apparently some Republicans are willing to play along.

These kinds of changes in Medicare and Medicaid are nothing new. Various versions of them have been included in every budget deal going back 30 years, and most especially in the bipartisan deals of 1990 and 1997. They do not constitute genuine entitlement reform. They will not fix Medicare and Medicaid. And they will not solve the nation’s budget problem.

Yes, on paper, the Congressional Budget Office will say they save money, perhaps even a lot of money. But CBO has said that every time a budget deal in the past has included similar provisions. As the years go by, the savings always vanish in the regulatory complexity of the programs, and entitlement spending continues to rise just as it always has. Moreover, arbitrary across-the-board payment cuts are actually damaging to the efficient operation of the health system. They lead to cost shifting, and they drive willing suppliers of services out of the marketplace. In the end, price controls do nothing to change the underlying reasons for cost growth.

So...the Republicans would get nothing. And a whole lot of it.

Excuse my Frogtalk, but why the frack should the GOP cave in on this? Because some jack-ass grandees over at the Washington Post are crying about it? Newsflash: The mainstream media hates Republicans and conservatives the way Roman Polanski hates statutory rape laws. They lie and lie and lie some more, all in the hopes of convincing enough people of the progressive-approved narratives.

More than a few people got their knickers in a twist when Rush Limbaugh said he hoped Barack Obama would fail. Very few people, even those on the Right, ever mention the countless magazine articles, newspaper op-eds and television pieces the MSM produces every goddamn day that practically begs the Lord for the Republicans to fall down a sinkhole and vanish from the political scene.

What about the Mitch McConnell horrible train wreck compromise, you ask? 'Demoralizing' would be a grotesque understatement. Imagine if in World War II the Allies spent months planning the D-Day invasion of Normandy, executed the landing, suffered horrendous casualties and successfully secured a beachhead in France...then turned around and went back to England on June 7th. That's the kind of insanity Senator McConnell is proposing here.

The Republicans have gone too far to stop now. If they do some sort of preemptive surrender where they end up with no real spending cuts while giving their imprimatur to Obama's liberalism, the GOP will all but guarantee the formation of a third party. That in turn will probably mean an Obama win in 2012. The stakes are that high.

Living And Fighting With The Left (KingShamus)

Bob Belvedere, a blogger you need to read, takes this view of the modern liberal mindset.

Leftism is incompatible with American Values. It despises custom, morality,and Right Reason. It rejects the importance of tradition and, in fact, scorns and spits on it. Leftists seek not to learn from the wisdom of those who have come before them. They disdain the hard-won knowledge that politics is the art of the possible. They seek to remake the world in their image, to be as gods.

How can you deal with such people?

You can’t because they believe they have found The Answer — that secret knowledge that the man of the Right believes can only be known to God. The Left believes mankind can be perfected, whereas those on the Right know that Human Beings are, well, human, in the purest sense of the that word — they err and will always err, they are flawed and will always fail.

Thus, the Right seeks to craft governments and institutions that put checks on the damage erring men can do. The Left, on the other hand, believing that people can be perfected, sees no reason for such restraints. Their faith in the idea that the Eschaton can be Immanentized, leads them to brook no opposition because, well, how can you oppose the Illuminated Wisdom they have discovered unless you’re an idiot or a fool? It is a torturous logic they follow and it leads, inevitably, given the frustrations they will experience imposing it on their flawed fellow Human Beings, to them torturing their fellow Human Beings. And it has in every single place it has been tried.

Read the whole thing. It's that good. I'll be here when you come back.

People have been saying this for a while, but Mr. Belvedere's post is a strong reminder of a fundamental truth: The progressive movement has engaged in a slow-motion just-slightly-under-the-radar civil war on traditional America for at least the last 50 years. The roots of this conflict lie in several places. Early utopian dreamers like Hebert Croly and John Dewey, frustrated by 18th century classical liberalism, laid the intellectual framework for several generations of liberal activists. Woodrow Wilson's Constitution-bashing administration is a key component. FDR's 'let no crisis go to waste' opportunism enshrined many unconstitutional assumptions into the fabric of American politics. All of these factors and more led to the rise of the 60's-era New Left radicals such as Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and Noam Chomsky. This driving force in US politics has scored many victories in the last five decades.

A skeptical reader might ask how the last fifty years in American political life can be seen a 'war.' After all, it can be argued that the Constitution creates the conditions for gridlock, narrow-issue voting blocs and partisan rancor. One could make the case that the modern wrangling we see over the national debt, abortion and our various wars is nothing more than business as usual. To some extent, the people who take this position are not completely wrong.

However, consider the following scenario: a state supreme court threatens to create a right to gay marriage if the state legislature doesn't do it on their own. The earliest American thinkers--even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall himself--couldn't have imagined a scenario where the legislature would be told by the judiciary to make a law. It goes against what most citizens in the modern era think of when they consider the roles of elected officials and the courts.

Think the situation laid out above is crazy? If you do, well, you're wrong. That's just the kind of insanity New York just went through in the push to legalize gay marriage.

The strategy used by the American Left, in which they use their ideological companions in the courts to force a result that progressives demand, is 'democratic' in roughly the same way that Josef Stalin's show trials were 'legal'. They both have the patina of the rule of law, but, in reality, they're both shams. In both instances, a large force bullies another party in order to come to a pre-determined outcome. Most importantly for our purposes, by going so far outside the bounds of constitutional law and tradition, progressives have all but abandoned previous understandings of how America governs itself. This amounts to nothing less than an act of war by the Left against groups of citizens it regards as not just political opponents, but as outright enemies.

It helps if one thinks about American politics like a football game. Imagine that the Washington Redskins are playing the New England Patriots. For three quarters, both sides play by the standard rules of the league. There are lead changes and penalties and back-and-forth action, but the teams play within
the framework of NFL regulations; i.e. a touchdown is six points, pass interference is illegal, etc. Then, at the start of the fourth quarter, Washington announces that it will play the rest of the game with 12 players on offense and defense, as opposed to the customary 11. A few minutes later, the 'Skins proclaim that their team will play with a round soccer ball (as opposed to the regulation football) and that they can merely kick it anywhere into the end zone to score a touchdown. Moments later, Washington announces that it will arm its players with hockey sticks which their team can use in any way they please. Finally, the Redskins bribe the officials to allow the Washington club to do whatever the hell it wants.

In this admittedly fanciful situation, it should be clear that while the New England Patriots were busy following the previously understood rules of the NFL game, the Washington Redskins had abandoned playing football altogether. The Washington squad was playing an entirely different game in order to beat New England. They didn't just cheat in order to get a blatantly unfair advantage over their opponent. By going so far outside the regulations, they had in effect declared war on the Patriots.

The same is true of American liberals over the last several decades. They have used anonymous bureaucrats, the judicial branch, moronic Republicans, the mainstream media and any other useful club to expand the size of government and ravage the old Constitutional order. Rarely do liberals score major victories through legislation alone. When they do, it is usually done over the strenuous objections of the citizenry.

This is war. It's not a war fought with bullets or bombs (except when Bill Ayers is really worked up). Instead, it's a war fought with statist regulations, legislation from the bench, Arlen Specter and Learjet liberal Hollywood propaganda. But just because there aren't battlefields and graveyards doesn't mean there isn't a serious conflict going on in America between liberals and conservatives. Whoever wins that fight will determine not just the fate of America, but the world economic and political order created by the US's influence.

Sarah Palin Pwns The Media--Again (KingShamus)

The Crack Emcee brings us a CNN anchor dude getting emo.

You’ve got to love this. They went after her – again – and they got nothing! All they’ve exposed is the media’s craven nature and it’s willingness to act as the go-to guy for the Democratic Party. Watch the clip. At one point the reporter looks *stunned* because he’s got to admit the person he’s “investigating” is somebody good who he clearly admires. It’s like he was given the job of killing a kid and he,..just,..can’t,…do it.

Da Emcee nails it...again.

How about we call the former governor by her rightful title. Sarah Palin: The Most Vetted Non-Presidential Candidate Ever.

Did anybody go through Barack Obama's e-mails as US Senator when he announced his run for the Presidency? If the media did, you never heard about it. Ya gotta think that if the lamestreamers did find anything in an Obama email nit-pick expedition, some producer or editor at one of the big media dogs would dutifully toss it down the memory hole. Wouldn't want the general public to get an unfoavorable impression of the Left's Chocolate Jesus sacred worship figure.

Numerous news outlets have decided to crowdsource the Palin e-mails. Did these same media organs go with this tactic when ObamaCare was being debated? How about Cap-n-Trade? What about the Porkulus? Nope. None of that got our Fourth Estate a-rolling like Palin's e-mails.

Amazing.

I'm a Herman Cain supporter. I hope he is the GOP nominee in 2012 because I think he's got the best shot at beating Obama. Having said that, here's an argument for a Sarah Palin presidential run: Nobody can touch the chick. They can't lay a glove on her. Her detractors couldn't hit her with an RPG if she
was the broad side of a barn and they were standing ten feet away.

The Left throws everything at her. They have fired every salvo they possibly can. They've had squirrelly weirdo reporters move next door to her house. They engage in bizarre conspiracy theories about the 'true' mother of Trig Palin. They blow her verbal 'gaffes' into week-long exposes, then get cranky when it turns out that she was right.

The progressives almost always come out looking worse than she does whenever they get into a food fight with Palin. She makes them look ridiculous. Better still, because the left cannot stand to get humiliated, they forget the first rule of holes: when you've put yourself at the bottom of one, the first thing you should do is stop digging. Instead, they continue to take shots at her, hoping that just once they'll get lucky and put an end to her career in public life.

Chances are that the media has found every possible trouble spot Sarah Palin might have in her background. Barring something completely out of the blue, there are no scandals lurking in Palin's history. If there was, you can be sure the MSM would've reported it by now.

You can argue against Palin on stylistic grounds. You might think her snowbillyisms and folksy demeanor won't translate into a winning formula in a national election. You can even question some of her policy emphases.

The one big advantage Sarah Palin has over everyone else in the 2012 presidential field is that there will be no surprises. Every rock has been turned over. If she runs for the White House, you can be sure the media will keep digging into her past. You can also be sure that Palin will beat them more often than not. In a race that is certainly going to be a media-driven death march against whoever the GOP nominates, being a proven MSM slayer is no small thing.

Anthony Weiner and Mutually Assured Partisan Destruction (KingShamus)

Ace of Spades, in a post that puts a nice neat bow on Phase I of Weinergate, had this to say about how the political class treats its sex scandals.

The other thing that I thought, frequently, when I asked myself, "Why push this?," is: Because this is what we do.

Is that a good system? I don't know, but it is the system.

And I know I got very angry indeed when champion dickweed Howard Kurtz sneeringly informed me that in this one case, it would not be the system.

Unacceptable, Kurtz. We shall not have a regime of hard, punitive rules for conservatives and soft, forgiving rules for liberals.

I was thinking that this is like the Prisoner's Dilemma.

I believe both parties, and most people in the public eye, would agree, if they could make an agreement which could be enforced and relied upon, that "We shall not beat up each other over this stuff."

That would accrue to everyone's interest in the political/media class. Note I speak only of this class. I am not saying that this agreement would serve anyone else's interests. But it would serve politicians' and media-types' interests.

You don't screw with me, I don't screw with you. For this class, such an agreement would be mostly upside.

But the problem is, of course, the same one as is the whole point of the Prisoner's Dilemma: You can't trust your opponents to go soft on you.

So what do you do? Concede the field, in which case only your own allies get pummeled like this, but you sweetly avoid pummeling their guys in the hopes that they will honor their side of the bargain?

They won't. They never do.

Read the entire piece. It's full of win.

Both American political parties, from the show horses on down to the foot soldiers, simply cannot maintain the kind of reciprocal understanding Ace describes. He's absolutely correct when he says that the political class would benefit enormously from a mutual agreement to shut the hell up about it's sex scandals. For a lot of reasons, politicos can't resist the attack dog urge. Interestingly, it wasn't always this way.

In the 60's, when John Kennedy had hot and cold running girls installed at the White House, the Republicans knew about JFK's peccadilloes and decided to keep their powder dry. Whether it was out of a desire to keep their own shenanigans private or just out of a sense of deference to the presidency, the GOP were tight-lipped about President Kennedy's numerous extramarital excursions. Congressman Weiner's misadventures in web-based hook-ups make it clear that the old early sixties circumspect attitude is not just gone, but probably can't come back.

This inability on the part of the Democrats and Republicans to hold their fire is a big reason why Mitch Daniels' idea of a truce on social issues is so monumentally wrong-headed. Who polices that agreement? Nobody could; even if every Washington DC politician said yes to it, no single person or organization would be trusted by either side to act as a fair mediator/enforcer.

Another problem with Daniel's truce is that even if the politicians went along with the deal, the mainstream media most certainly would not. The most knee-jerk attack dog partisans in American politics are the editors, producers and reporters that make up the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the lamestream Democrat Party rah-rah chorus. If they have access to information that helps Democrats or damages Republicans, they will run it. This will force Breitbart and his allies to do the same thing when they get information damaging to the Dems. The truce would be over almost before it started.

In fact, given how cuddly the MSM is with the Democrat party, a truce on social issues could only hurt Republicans. With the exception of Fox News and several big-name rightish blogs/websites, the conservative argument against abortion, gay rights and other lifestyle debates is almost never given a fair treatment by the big news outfits. Under the Daniels scenario, Democrats could truthfully say they weren't scoring points while their allies in the press and Hollywood kept pushing the progressive agenda. Republicans would have few options. They couldn't expect the MSM to help them out. Worse, the Republican's sorta allies on the Right blogs--the ones that might be able to pump up a conservative social agenda--just don't yet have the same kind of reach that the lamestreamers have in the media universe.

Finally, just how far down the political totem pole would the truce go? Would it only affect the Beltway folks? If that's the case, the social issues gag order would unravel as soon as a state legislature votes to approve gay marriage, put limits on abortion, allow prayer in school or mandate that teachers instruct students on condom use. Just because DC pols swear off social issues legislation doesn't mean the states have to. As soon as a controversial social issue flared up at the state level, national Republicans and Democrats would almost have to weigh in. That would put enormous pressure on the truce's architecture; once one politician says something, others are going to want to discuss it too.

Weiner's train wreck is a reminder of just how impossible a voluntary censorship of any kind is in modern politics. Political figures cannot be bound by informal gag orders. Mutually assured partisan destruction won't hold anybody back from using damn near any club to beat their opponents over the head. The price is too low and the payoffs are too high.

Herman Cain, Southern Whites And The Race Issue (KingShamus)

Allahpundit over at HotAir.com makes an astute observation about the rising political fortunes of Herman Cain.

By the way, note his choice of hat here and the country/western soundtrack. Like I said after Frank Luntz’s focus group went nuts for him in South Carolina, he may very well emerge as the “southern candidate” in the field. How the media’s going to square that with their deathless assumptions about southern conservative racism, I have no idea — but it’ll be amazing to watch.

Read the rest, I’d say.

What does it mean to be from the South? If you listen to the scions of popular culture, all you have to do to find a racist sexist homophobe proto-fascist is talk to a denizen of old Dixie for five seconds. It’s such a lazy intellectually dishonest position, but many people have internalized that sentiment. For some, merely hearing a Southern accent means the speaker is thinly-disguised uber bigot. The truth is far more nuanced, and much kinder to Southern folk, than tired shopworn stereotypes.

Does racism exist in the South? Of course it does. Flawed human beings, not choirs of angels, live in the South. The real issue is just how much race plays in electoral politics. The 2008 presidential election gives us an indication of the race factor. It seems like the answer is 'Not nearly as much as you might think'. Barack Obama beat up on John McCain in North Carolina and Virginia, two key members of the old Confederacy. Obama's victories would suggest that caucasian persuasion racial animus wasn't enough to stop voters in these states from pulling the Donkey Lever.

Since the South isn't a bastion of knee-jerk race hate, here's an interesting question--What happens when 60% of Southern whites vote for Herman Cain in the 2012 general election? How does pop culture, with all of its built-in lefty prejudices, react to that?

There are two probable outcomes to that hypothetical scenario. One is that Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment universe will pull an Officer Barbrady and act like that Cain's snagging the cracker vote is no big deal. The South is still racist, but those stupid hillbilly wingnuts are so thick that they can't help but vote Republican even though the GOP nominee is a black man. Lord knows the media loves to ignore things that mess with their preferred narratives. The old head-firmly-buried-in-ones-own-ass approach has served the entertainment biz quite well over the years, so this is quite likely to happen once again.

The other possibility is that pop culture figures acknowledge that southern whiteys voted for a black man, but will argue that Herman Cain doesn't count as a true brother because he's conservative. As strange as that sounds, it's well within the bounds of cultural Left's playbook. According to Jesse Jackson Jr., if you're black and you don't vote for health care reform, you're not really black. According to the weird feminist sisters, Sarah Palin's right-of-center leanings means she's not really a woman.

Both of the above predictions/probabilities make the Left look incredibly stupid. Which is all the more reason why Herman Cain should be the Republican nominee for President in 2012. Make Cain the GOP standard-bearer, then watch how Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and Chris Rock struggle to explain that Herman Cain's victory doesn't count as racial tolerance. Failing that, put Cain at the top of the ticket, then get a good hearty laugh when doucherocket cultural critics like Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West try to explain to average Americans that Herman Cain really is not black.

Culture, Islam And The Sting Of Failure (KingShamus)

In the post 9/11 age, Westerners have tried to explain why Islam has taken such a violent turn. From full-throated terrorist apologias to more sober hard-eyed analyses, America and her civilizational cousins have examined the reasons for violent jihad. Great debates have been had over the last ten years. September 11th was a wake-up call for many Westerners. While many of us are still asleep, the US conservative movement has at long last decided to examine the deeper motivations and passions that drive Islamic fundamentalism.

While this process of examination has been beneficial, sometimes it is necessary to listen to Muslim dissidents themselves. They will often tell you far more of the story than you'd likely get from other sources. That's why Raymond Ibrahim's translation of a Khaled Montaser piece is pretty important.

We Muslims have an inferiority complex and are terribly sensitive to the world, feeling that our Islamic religion needs constant, practically daily, confirmation by way of Europeans and Americans converting to Islam. What rapturous joy takes us when a European or American announces [their conversion to] Islam—proof that we are in a constant state of fear, alarm, and chronic anticipation for Western validation or American confirmation that our religion is "okay." We are hostages of this anticipation, as if our victory hinges on it—forgetting that true victory is for us to create or to accomplish something, such as those [civilizations] that these converts to our faith abandon.

And we pound our drums and blow our horns [in triumph] and drag the convert to our backwardness, so that he may stand with us at the back of the world's line of laziness, [in the Muslim world] wherein no new scientific inventions have appeared in the last 500 years. Sometimes those who convert relocate to our countries—only to get on a small boat and escape on the high seas back to their own countries.

There's a lot of truth to digest there.

First, it is important to note that there are Muslim scientists and thinkers doing important work. They study and invent and innovate not in Damascus, Jakarta or Tehran but in London, Frankfurt and Chicago. This indicates that there is no genetic or racial basis for the lack of 'Islamic inventions'. It is
the culture of Muslim-majority nations that is stifling.

The West in general, and America in particular, is the only place where a Muslim can safely use his mind to create something other than yet another jihadist ideology or violent terrorist organization. If you're a clever Muslim who wants to invent something in the United States, chances are that the fast-thinking Farouk will be rewarded for his hard work and labor should his innovation actually perform. The same cannot be said for the vast swath of kleptocracies that riddle the Middle East. The man with a plan in the Islamic sphere will most likely see his good idea stolen by the thieves that man the important government posts or ignored by religious fundamentalists. There's really no reason for the intelligent person to even bother trying, so he doesn't.

That five hundred year failure rate has to gall many hard-core Muslims. While the mongrelized infidels in America and Europe have dominated the world with rapidly changing technology, vibrant expansionist pop culture and wild commercial success, Muslims live off the fruits of Western intellectualism but cannot hope to emulate it in their own homelands. According to the Koran, it is Muslims that have the truth--and more importantly, God--on their side. For Islamic supremacists, having God in their corner should've meant that they would be blessed with inventions and innovations. They should've been the winners of progress, not the debauched kaffir West.

Consider another irony. Even many of the Islamic sphere's bad ideas come from us. The Ba'ath party that dominated Iraq and continues to oppress Syria is merely an Arab facelift for a German socialism. Bashar al-Assad is basically Erich Honeker with a much funnier name and a slightly more brutal secret police organization.

More to the point of Montaser's article, Islam's constant seeking of Western validation--specifically through the conversion of Westerners to Islam--speaks to the inherent weakness of the faith. We in the West sometimes think that Muslim expansionism is a sign that the Western world or that Judeo-Christian values are in decline. But what does it say about Islam when the only way they can feel good about themselves is if some Eurotrash brainfart or American half-wit starts praying to Mecca five times a day?

When you always have to have the approval of others, you are doomed. The same is likely true for the supremacist version of Islam. While non-Muslims cannot do much to make that collapse happen, we can encourage those voices who criticize the backwardness of modern Islam.

I snagged the link from Kathy Shaidle's Five Feet Of Fury, who directed me to Jihad Watch, which got me to Raymond Inrahim's post. Thanks to all.

Mitt Romney's Health Care Speech Settles Some Issues (KingShamus)

The main issue that it solves? The possibility of Mitt Romney being elected president in 2012.

I can't get the video to embed, so here's a link.

Summary: "I'm not apologizing for RomneyCare. I thought it was cool, so whatevs. Also, I'm not changing anything from my 2008 health care plan because that would look like I was flip-flopping and I sorta have an image problem about being a slippery political weasel."

No really, watch the clip. Then come back and tell me that's not pretty much what homeboy said.

Meanwhile, Allahpundit does his counter-intuitive reaction thing to Romney's speech.

No one would have believed him had he apologized so there was no sense in doing it. On the contrary, if I were advising him, I’d tell him to go on the attack and make his opponents be as specific as possible in what they’d do differently. The more he can discredit their plans as unworkable, the more he can reframe RomneyCare as the best choice from a very bad set of health-care policy options. In fact, if he’s feeling extra cheeky, he could use the public’s ruinous love affair with Medicare to his advantage. Under RomneyCare, the state forces you to buy a product from a third party; under Medicare, the state forces
you to buy the same product from the state. It simply calls it a tax instead of a mandate, and instead of granting you coverage immediately, it shafts you until you’re 65. Do Pawlenty, Gingrich, et al. also oppose the “mandated” premiums known as FICA? I’m not sure Romney wants to go the Mediscare route since it’ll make fiscal cons even angrier at him than they are now, but if he gets desperate enough, look out.

If Mitt has any chance of getting the GOP nomination, Republican primary voters will first have to get over their lingering reservations about Romney's past social liberalism and his more recent changes of political heart. Importantly, the party rank-n-file will have to get over it's virulent hatred for ObamaCare. If the President's government medicine scheme is no longer seen as a huge threat, RomneyCare will not seem like such a big deal. That means that Mitt won't have to keep defending his Massachusetts health plan. Most of all, issues like foreign policy or terrorism, will have to come to the forefront of GOPers concerns.

The rub for Romney is that his doubling-down strategery can only be successful if a bunch of things break his way. The irony here is that super-achiever alpha dog Mitt finds himself in a position akin to a middling baseball team just before the regular season begins. What do the managers of these kind of clubs always say? 'If our ace starting pitcher stays healthy, we'll win a pile of games.' 'We can be successful if the third baseman can repeat his slugging stats from last year.' 'The team is gonna do real well if a few of our rookies pan out and live up to their potential.'

Ball clubs like that almost never succeed. Why? Because there are simply too many factors that have to go right. Let's say the stud hurler keeps himself from getting hurt for the entire year. That doesn't mean those year one noobs are going to pan out. The third baseman who hammered fifty home runs last
season? He just tested positive for cattle steroids and will be lucky to plink out fifteen dingers after his fifty game suspension and his lack of chemically-enhanced power.

Romney is in the same position. Because of his problematic voting record and his insistence on defending his health care plan, Mitt has to rely on a heaping helping of good fortune. All politicians require a large infusion of luck to get elected. In Romney's case, his chances ride on a set of circumstances that isn't likely to fall into place. By making this speech, Romney has decided that he's most likely not going to be president.

Why Does Ezra Klein Hate Himself? (KingShamus)

I ask because that's the only reason I can figure why he pwns himself, then doubles down on stupid via his Twitter stream.

In a recent post at the Washington Post's site, juicebox mafia capo Klein thinks he's figured out who Barack Obama really is.

Perhaps this is just the logical endpoint of two years spent arguing over what Barack Obama is — or isn’t. Muslim. Socialist. Marxist. Anti-colonialist. Racial healer. We’ve obsessed over every answer except the right one: President Obama, if you look closely at his positions, is a moderate Republican from the early 1990s. And the Republican Party he’s facing has abandoned many of its best ideas in its effort to oppose him.

If you put aside the emergency measures required by the financial crisis, three major policy ideas have dominated American politics in recent years: a health-care plan that uses an individual mandate and tax subsidies to achieve near-universal coverage; a cap-and-trade plan that attempts to raise the prices of environmental pollutants to better account for their costs; and bringing tax rates up from their Bush-era lows as part of a bid to reduce the deficit. In each case, the position that Obama and the Democrats have staked out is the very position that moderate Republicans staked out in the early ’90s — and often, well into the 2000s.

It's important to note just who is making this wack-job statement.  As noted by my new blog homie Proof, Ezra Klein was the founder of the junior high mutual zit-squeezing club Journolist.  The four hundred reporters, academics, professional liberals and assorted mouth breathers in the listserv were basically a wing of the Obama presidential campaign in 2008, with future Obambi Cabinet members to boot.  Needless to say, Klein has a serious intellectual interest in rehabilitating his teeny bopper fan boi crush's political fortunes.

Now, let's look at the 90's era Republican's 'best ideas'.  The individual mandate that some Republicans championed back in the day was...and more importantly, is...unconstitutional.  I know Klein thinks the Constitution is just some old impossible to understand scrap of parchment, but when something is plainly unconstitutional that pretty much makes it a stupid idea, not a good one.

As for cap-n-trade, I don't know if paid Washington Post journalist Ezra Klein has been keeping up with current events, but anthropogenic climate change has been revealed to be a fraud.  C&T was a policy cooked up in response to fears of global warming caused by man-made carbon dioxide emissions.  Why would Republicans keep advocating a policy that supposedly solves a problem that does not in fact exist?

Finally, we get to Klein lauding President George HW Bush for raising taxes.  Ezra pats Pappy on the back for 'getting the job done' on the 1990 budget deal in his original piece.  Funny thing is that Klein never really specifies how these tax hikes were successful, either as policy or politics.  He just sorta says they are and moves on.

When confronted about the shakiness of his 'Republican raises taxes = epic win' theory, Klein has a ready retort:

This is the part when you realize that debating Ezra Klein is like having  a discussion with Barry Bonds about the dangers of performance enhancing drugs.  No, it's even worse than that.  It's like debating a pre-med student on specific techniques and methods involved in neurosurgery.  The dude is simply in way over his head. 

How did Bush the Elder get wacked for raising taxes?  For one thing, Bill Clinton hammered him for it in campaign ads.

 

That ad was a staple of Clinton's 1992 campaign.  What makes the spot so effective--and what Ezra Klein simply cannot grasp--is that HW Bush's raising taxes gave Clinton ammunition that didn't just wound the President, but also damaged the Republican brand on a critical everyday checkbook issue.  Why does Klein think people vote for the GOP anyway if not because of tax policy?  It must be for the Republican's famous snappy fashion sense and party-hearty attitude [sarc/].

The best part of Klein's journey into fail is when he is again confronted with his stunning lack of understanding, he resorts to the lamest of rhetorical evasions and promptly moves the goalposts.  But hey, far be it from me to point out how badly his argument is falling apart.  Let's let Klein's own source, that he dutifully pointed out, do it for us.

If politicians are not rewarded at the polls for the choices they make, don't expect other politicians to make similar choices. 

What exactly are we dealing with here?  Klein brings up a political period from the recent past.  It's not like it's a hundred years ago, when the issues and characters involved are far removed from our current context.  Nor are we talking about particularly deep or convoluted political theory.  No, this stuff is pretty easy to understand.

Which makes me believe that Ezra Klein is not just another overpaid undersmart liberal.  By producing such an elementary amateurish piece--and then digging further down into the proverbial hole--it's clear Klein is a masochist.

Wanna Demoralize The Left? Start With Denormalizing Them (KingShamus)

Ace had a great post the other day that I meant to talk about, but I didn't get to it.  Well, I'm getting to it now.

Here's the money chunk.

...And at universities, in the pseudo-sciences, they are constantly attempting to "explain" conservative thinking as a type of cognitive dysfunction. Not willing to give into the faddish and ephemeral? Ah, well, a part of your brain is too small and won't let you sample "new experiences."

Note the normative assumption always packed into these claims: That the conservative brain is "too small" as compared to the liberal brain, defined as normative; the conservative measure represents a deviation away from the assumed norm while the liberal trait is privileged as the norm, or if not the norm, then the ideal.

No pseudo-scientist every finds that liberals have a bigger amygdala (or whatever) and are therefore "too open to new experiences" (a.k.a. too trendy, too faddish, too ephemeral in one's sense of self). None of these guys ever says the liberal trait represents a deviation from the norm or ideal -- no, they're always the norm or idea. It's always the conservative's traits that need to be "explained" as a psychological defect or an actual defect with their physical brain structure.

Yeah, you should definitely read the whole thing.

The thing is, that denormalizing process of conservatives and conservatism Ace talked about has been going on for a long time.  To pick just one example, think about guns.  For most of America's history, gun ownership wasn't really debated all that much.  It was only relatively recently that the Left got the bright idea to limit gun ownership amongst law-abiding citizens. 

A key part of the anti-gun strategy was to denormalize the idea of firearms.  Guns weren't just supposed to be severely curtailed in the general population.  They were weirdo objects for strange people.  Whether it was geographic arguments ("Southerners are all gun nuts, of course") or class justifications ("The uneducated are the only ones people who still have guns") the goal was the same.  In fact, lefties were so hell bent on making guns abnormal they faked at least one scholar-researched book to make it look like America didn't have widespread gun ownership in it's history.

In general, the Left has had some success in making conservatism seem strange.  At the very least, they've reinforced amongst themselves the 'Right=Alien' arguments they always make.  For committed progressives, conservatives are not just political rivals anymore.  They're the Other.

Truth be told, the hard Left doesn't make up a majority of American citizens.  Break it down on a state-by-state basis.  Even where they make up the largest percentage of voters, they don't make up a majority.  From those perspectives, it's pretty easy to see just how marginal the liberal ideology is in America.

Conservatives should take this vulnerability on the Left--specifically, their lack of numbers-- and use it against them.  More importantly, how about we examine and highlight their own behavior.  For your viewing pleasure, courtesy of No One Of Any Import, are some lefty protestors barking at a recent Tea Party rally.

 

 

Blinkered, moronic and as charming as athlete's foot ?  Where's the sign-up sheet for that?

Lefties insist that they are the sane, logical and normal ones.  

Yeah, that dude is totally playing with a full deck.

Before we get too cocky, liberals have a few advantages.  They still control the MSM and they can still get some progged-up professors to create 'science' to prove their ideological biases.  These are no small things.  They can dupe a lot of the politically uncommitted folks out there.

However, conservatives have distinct advantages of our own. As stated before, the voter identification numbers are on our side.  Best of all, any time the Left goes out in public, they behave like the complete oddballs that they really are.  It shouldn't be too hard to make liberals seem strange--because they are strange.  

Seriously, you have a group of people that are cool with one of their own shouting that he wipes his ass with the American flag every night.  Now that's definitely a little bit of hyperbole on his part, but the fact remains that homeboy's peers were copacetic with his sentiment that the American flag should be disrespected early and often.  Just a reminder:  THIS IS NOT NORMAL.

The Right can score legislative victories.  They can win elections.  But in order to really make inroads they have to start beating back progressive culture.  That means pointing out just how alien their ideology is when compared with the mainstream of American political thought.

ALSO:  Here's the great RS McCain with a story about another Lefty weirdo.  How weird are we talking about here?  How's about possible jail time sound? 

Seriously, click the link.

Who Gets Political Donations? (KingShamus)

One thing is for certain:  From 1989 to 2010, it sure as shit wasn't the Republican Party.

I snagged this from Open Secrets via the cool Bunkerville blog.  Money quote.

Looks like the Unions are flush with cash. Too bad they don’t spend it on their members.

Haha.

Let's suppose you're a UAW member.  You do your job.  You toss in your dues.  Then you notice that your union has given $29 million dollars to Democrat Party candidates.  Now your leadership might be hunky-dory with pro-gun control pro-abortion eco-nut tax-hiker gay friendly candidates, but how cool are you with all that?

Maybe the UAW isn't such a good example.  President Obama just gave them a car company.  Maybe the guy on the line is willing to put up with the vast variety of lefty crap if he thinks he got a good deal out of hijacking Government Motors.

Lets try a different group.  What about the rank-n-file Teamsters?  Thirty million dollars were sent from that union's coffers to political candidates, with 93% of that going to Donkey Punchers.  The Unicorn-in-Chief's energy policies ("Drill Nowhere, Drill Never, Double Eco-Boner Rainbow All The Way!") have pushed diesel prices up past four dollars a gallon.  That's gotta be putting a serious hurt on the wallet of most truckers.

The leadership of unions no doubt enjoys having a cozy relationship with Democrat Party power brokers.  Rubbing elbows with the well-connected Donks and getting them to push the union big-wig's agenda is huge.  The problem is that the average union member might not think their interests are being represented very well if all their dues money is going to Democrat candidates.

Bill Ayers: "I Wrote 'Dreams From My Father'" (KingShamus)

The great Jerome Corsi documents yet another shrapnel fragment flying off the continuing Obama train wreck. 

 

Bill Ayers: One more, one more (question)

Question:Thank you sir, thank you, thank you. Time magazine columnist Joe Klein wrote that President Obama's book, "Dreams from My Father," quote: "may be the best written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

Ayers: I agree with that.

Question:What is your opinion of Barack Obama's style as a writer and uh …

Ayers: I think the book is very good, the second book ("The Audacity of Hope") is more of a political hack book, but uh, the first book is quite good.

Question: Also, you just mentioned the Pentagon and Tomahawk …

Ayers: Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?

Question: What's that?

Ayers: I wrote that book.

Several audience members: Yeah, we know that.

Question: You wrote that?

Ayers: Yeah, yeah. And if you help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much.

Oooooof.

WND contributor Jack Cashill seems to thinkthis is a shot across Barack Obama's bow.  In his opinion, the very anti-war Bill Ayers is angry at Obama for the President's Libyan war kinetic military action.  I think that's a pretty good assessment.

I don't believe that's the entire story here though.  I think Bill Ayers is suffering from a classic case of 'Tire Tracks From Under Obama's Bus' Syndrome.  Peace Prize Barry basically used Ayers like a kleenex.  Instead of Ayers catching at least a little credit for penning Dreams--something like 'By Barack Obama and William Ayers'--homeboy got a whole lot of nothing.   

It might have been easier on Ayers to get no props for Dreamswhen Obambi was a hack community rabble-rouser or a benchwarming Illinois state Senator.  When the former Weatherman watched Obama become a Democrat Party show-horse and media-created President, without ever acknowledging Bill Ayers' full contribution to the St. Bambi mythos, that was probably incredibly grating.  Obama's North African adventurism may have been simply the last straw.

More importantly than Bill Ayers needing to recover from his skinned knee and bruised ego, this episode is just one more nail in the coffin for the Barack Obama 2008 campaign narrative.  Dreams From My Fatherwas a big piece of Obama's intellectual curriculum vitae.  As opposed to the supposedly illiterate Dubya or the crusty old warrior John McCain, Candidate Lightbringer was a serious author who had written not one, but two books.  Dreams and The Audacity of Hope were meant to display Barry's intellectual firepower.  While the junior Senator from Illinois had almost no legislative accomplishments, his alleged mastery of the written word was supposed to assure nervous voters that they were supporting a true Renaissance man.

And now we see the myth of Obama's intellectualism crumbling.  All it took was one of the key enablers in Bamster's web of lies to get pissed off at his former protegé.  Barry's chickens are finally coming home to roost.

But really, one can't be completely shocked when a politician as weaselly as Barack Obama is found out to have inflated his resume.  To paraphrase Winston Churchill's comments about Clement Atlee, Senator HopeyChangey's barely-there congressional record had much to be humble about.  No empty-suit candidate with a similar doughnut hole in his history could do anything else.  Obama is clearly no exception to this fibbing phenomenon.

The blame for Obama being able to pull off this sham rests not with the president, but with the American mainstream press.  The New York Times/MSNBC/Washington Post Axis of Fail constantly pats itself on the crotch for brave truth-telling.  Instead of digging into Obama's shady past, they did everything they could to bury damaging details about their preferred candidate and attacked his opposition.

Better still, this MSM willful blindness also reveals just how badly they suck at the one job in which they're supposed to be experts.  They're the ones who were supposed to figure out just how much Bill Ayers figured into Barack Obama's narrative.  The lamestream press allowed the illusion of Barack Obama's superior intelligence--a major component of his appeal to voters--to flourish without a question.  By doing that, they set themselves up to be punked by bloggers who have shown more initiative in the last two years than Big Media has shown in the last two decades.

UPDATE: Now a big ole' Memeorandum thread too. Time to pile on while the piling on is good, I say.

UPDATE II:  Allahpundit offers a dissenting view:

Via the American Thinker. I think John Hawkins is spot on in detecting the sarcasm here, but if you’re inclined to believe that Ayers is The One’s ghostwriter, you’re bound to detect a “deeper truth” in his tone.

... I think he enjoys mocking people who push this idea and enjoys it doubly when they can’t detect the mockery. In fact, I’d bet that this is his stock response anytime the book is mentioned in his presence — insisting that he wrote it to see if the listener laughs and then toying with them if they seem credulous. But as I say, your mileage may vary.

Yeah, this doesn't exactly work for me.  AP's analysis blithely discounts Jack Cashill's work that pretty much proves that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams".  Cashill lays out the bones of his argument here.

To credit Dreamsto Obama alone, one has to posit any number of near miraculous variables: he somehow found the time; he somewhere mastered nautical jargon and postmodern jabberwocky; he in some sudden, inexplicable way developed the technique and the talent to transform himself from stumbling amateur to literary superstar without any stops in between.

If anything, the last few years should make Cashill's thesis even more believable.  The Duffer-in-Chief is not exactly breaking his back as President.  Dude works harder on his NCAA basketball brackets than on seemingly anything else.   The guy requires a teleprompter for both formal and informal occasions.  It seems highly unlikely that Barack Obama would put in the work necessary to become a strong writer.       

Moreover, why can't two things be true at once?  Why can't Bill Ayers be sarcastic and be telling the truth at the same time?  I mean, it's sorta weird, but it's not such a strange thing.  Ayers is a squirrelly lib hack.  It makes weird sense that he'd do something so goofy and underhanded.  Homeboy probably gets a little thrill thinking how clever he is laying out this secret in plain view.

Of Japan and New Orleans: Honor, Shame and Identity

A great deal of commentary and comments has been generated which compares the horrendous situation in Japan to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  Observers note that while New Orleans residents—and even police officers—took disaster’s opportunity to loot businesses and homes, the Japanese survivors of the 9.0 earthquake and the resultant tsunami have absolutely abstained from such behavior.  People who know far more about Japan than I have concluded that the absence of such behavior is due to Japan’s singular, nearly undiluted culture—a thousand-year long tradition in which honor is the only thing one has and the loss of which is the greatest loss imaginable.

This makes sense.  After all, most material things that are lost can be accrued again relatively quickly while one is still living.  Lost honor, however, is very tough to regain and is, sometimes, gone forever.

Some of the comments have bordered on the racialist—that the Japanese don’t loot because it’s not in their racial make-up and that others—namely blacks—do so because it is part of our racial make-up.  Leaving aside the insult, I think the difference goes deeper than that, even deeper than the concept of lost honor.  There’s something that the Japanese understand which all too many black and other Americans used to understand but now do not: that what one does in public and how one treats his/her neighbor(s) affects not only the individuals involved but also the entire community.  This concept applies to local communities and to the larger community; the nation.  Not understanding that is the downside of individualism.  (Of course, honor-shame cultures have their downsides as well; Japan has a very high rate of suicide.)

I submit that Katrina’s New Orleans was a manifestation of a people—namely black people—who have voluntarily given up their honor and their sense of shame.  They have abandoned themselves.

Black Americans—specifically, the descendants of American slavery--are the most American of Americans; I said this before and I’m certainly not the first to make this observation.  Unlike all other immigrants to America, our ancestors were forcibly cut off from all of the totems of their various West African tribes: names, languages, family structures, belief systems.  These things have buoyed all other ethnic groups—including recent African immigrants—in their sojourn to this country and all of them had the choice to hold onto the elements of their cultures that fit into the American ideal and discard those which were incompatible.  American slaves were granted no such luxury.  Our ancestors were emptied of their identities and re-created in the image of what America had for them.  And, up until roughly fifty years ago, much of that image was molded by oppression and scorn. 

However, most black Americans held on tightly to the universal totems of personal and communal honor: love of God, family, love of community, industriousness, self-reliance--all of which also flow and follow from America’s founding document.  (That America strayed away from those principles with respect to black Americans isn’t the point, that those principles even existed is. And, with those concrete principles in hand, black Americans were able to point to them and say to other Americans, “live up to your—to our-- principles.”)  

We may stem from Africa, but we are not of Africa—not even me.  Our character and (sub)culture are wholly American and, largely, our American ancestors fashioned these for themselves--appropriating most of the good things which America had to offer and which largely insulated them from the bad.  That is the inheritance which all too many of us have repudiated.

What we saw in New Orleans after Katrina was a microcosm of the character disintegration of this most American of Americans.  It wasn’t born of DNA nor of the historical effects of slavery; it was born of the wholesale abandonment of a character tried and refined by fire and of the principles which held black Americans together in prior times of adversity. 

If mother and father don’t love child enough to at least try to create the most tried and true environment for the nurturing of that child, it follows that neither mother, nor father, nor child will love and respect neighbors or community.  We declined en masse the prescriptions and proscriptions of God regarding the family and allowed government to usurp the place of the head of the family--the husband/father/leader/protector. We abandoned the identity which our forebears shaped for us and put chaos in its place.  And when disaster strikes, it’s every man and woman for self.  Multiply that times a few million.

 In short, the average Japanese person loves his (Japanese) neighbor and does not covet that which belongs to that neighbor.  It’s part of their culture—their belief system.  And they’ve held to that system without Judaism or Christianity being a significant part of their society.  They know who they are and from whence they’ve come. 

When are we going to remember who we are?

Helping Japan:

Soldier's Angels

 

Baby Boomer Blues (KingShamus)

Matt over at the Conservative Hideout has some thoughts on the so-called 'Worst Generation'.

My parent’s generation spent the wealth that was so painfully earned by their parents.  Then, they created failed program after failed program, all paid for with trillions of borrowed dollars.  And when the programs were clearly failures, and, in fact, made things worse, they plodded on.  The kept following the leftist narrative, and never-ever cut their own benefits, no matter how unsustainable they were.  They also rejected the spirit of their parents, who had endured the great depression, and survived WW II.  Their parents had sacrificed, but the boomers wanted what they wanted, and they wanted it immediately.

Read the whole piece, ya'all.

While I agree with much of Matt's sentiments, I think the Baby Boomers sometimes get a bad rap.  After all, they didn't come up with Social Security.  That was second-gen progressive Franklin Roosevelt's idea.  The Great Society programs--Medicare, Aid To Families With Dependent Children--were dreamed up by Lyndon Johnson.

No, the Boomers didn't create a lot of the now-crumbling social spending architecture that threatens to destroy America.  What many folks in the post WWII generation did was assume that the nationalized Ponzi schemes and subsidization of personal failure they inherited from older generations were going to continue without consequence.  With that monumentally absurd analysis in place, the New Left movements that arose in the Baby Boom generation set about creating ideologies and rationalizations that reinforced their flawed assumptions.

Look at one example.  Conservatives assert that welfare is destroying the American family.  Baby Boom feminists (and their intellectual progeny) argue that the traditional family is outdated and sexist.  The nuclear familial arrangement, with its coercion and fundamental unfairness towards women, is not worth being concerned about.  The dissolution of that unfair institution is not only necessary, it should be welcomed.  Welfare might be hurting marriage and the old family arrangements, but it's just doing the needed work to get society to the post-traditonal family that feminists crave.

While some elements of the Boomer left were busy cementing themselves into soft socialism and cultural Marxism, many others entered into the media.  Take a gander at who sets the agenda in much of the MSM.  Arthur 'Pinch' Sulzberger, the head of the New York Times, was born in 1951.  Steve Capus, president of NBC News, was born in 1963.  The editor of the Washington Post is Marcus Brauchli, who was born in 1961.   

These folks--and many others in the legacy media--are all part of the post-war Baby Boom.  How many times have you watched some gauzy nostalgia-laden montage of 60's and 70's era protests/concerts/hippie love-ins/Timothy Leary yammerings?  The reason why these dreadful creations are so ubiquitous is because the Boomers who look back at that time so fondly are the ones who make up the majority of American news organizations.  Further, most of the contemporary coverage of the baby boom social movements are almost always positive.  The excesses of dudes like Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman or Bill Ayers are generally airbrushed away.  Even better?  The self-congratulation to actual accomplishment ratio is usually quite skewed.  "Hooray for us, we stopped the Vietnam War and stuff.  Also, we listened to the Velvet Underground, so yeah..."  Yikes.

Because Baby Boomers--especially lefty boomers--dominate the media, they paint a distorted picture of 60's/70's youth.  If you just watched CNN or read Time Magazine, you'd think every teenager in America from 1966 to 1978 was an idealistic acid-gobbling Vietnam War protester who lived on commune in Southern California with her Native American spirit guide, seven sex partners and five children named after various wildflowers while David Crosby constructed ever more elaborate water bongs and Gloria Steinem ritualistically burned her bra.  The reality is that boomers during their formative years inhabited a broad continuum, from stern straight-laced traditionalists to wild-eyed liberal doucherockets, and that many of these neat categorizations we're fed just don't add up.

What is the worst sin of the Baby Boomers?  The knee-jerk leftism to which some of them continue to bitterly cling is annoying as hell.  The unreal self-descriptions and constant back-patting is tiresome.  The thing is that none of them would be particularly fatal.  They'd just be aggravating.

The most egregious error committed by the Boomers isn't any of that crap.  According to Stanley Kurtz, via the great Pundette, the issue for the 'Worst Generation' is the fact that they didn't make babies.

In 2005, I reviewed some of the first books on the subject and concluded that a demographically induced economic crisis could spark a revival of religious traditionalism, a far more radical decomposition of the family, or both.

At the time, it looked as if a possible demographically-induced economic crisis was at least a couple of decades away. We seem to be running ahead of schedule. To a large extent, the economic troubles here and in Europe already factor in the unsustainable entitlements of the future.

Although an economic crisis is imminent, and the underlying cause demographic, I haven’t noticed many calls for increased child-bearing. That is in striking contrast to the world-wide movement in response to the less proximate and more theoretical global warming crisis. It’s a measure of how unthinkable changes in our post-sixties life-styles still are. Yet it doesn’t mean change won’t happen, if and when a demographic-economic crisis truly strikes.

It probably doesn't matter all that much that a lot of Boomer peeps smoked a gazillion pounds of OG Kush looking for a cheap buzz or a spiritual experience or whatever.  The tendency for elf-esteem boosting hagiography of 60's and 70's accomplishments doesn't explain our present difficulties.  The leftist leaning of many in that generation by itself doesn't damn the post-war generation.

The fact that they couldn't be bothered to squeeze out a few more kids here and there is the lasting destructive legacy of the baby boom demographic.  In many cases, it wasn't purposeful.  Their intentions were often noble, or at least not totally self-serving anyway.  Often there were perfectly rational rationalizations for their reproductive decisions.  Career moves, financial choices, a concern for the environment, bad relationships, high divorce rates; all those things tend to slow down the baby-making.  More, all of these factors could've happened to any generation. 

I really don't think baby boomers sat down as an entire generational cohort and decided to stop making kids as much as their parents did.  I also don't think they all planned a demographic collapse that would threaten the entire economic future of the America.  There were definitely more than a few Boomers who were worried about overpopulation, but for the most part it was a host of decisions and life events that slowed the Boomer breeding.

The problem here is, like so many other good (or at least not-evil) intentions, America has managed to pave a road right into the abyss with miles of supposedly good plans and allegedly smart ideas.  The Boom generation didn't mean for this to happen.  Nonetheless, we find ourselves in dire circumstances due to some very misguided decisions.   

The West's Reaction To Islam (KingShamus)

Daniel Pipes ponders the notion of an Islam compatible with democracy.

Just as Christianity became part of the democratic process, so can Islam. This transformation will surely be wrenching and require time. The evolution of the Catholic Church from a reactionary force in the medieval period into a democratic one today, an evolution not entirely over, has been taking place for 700 years. When an institution based in Rome took so long, why should a religion from Mecca, replete with its uniquely problematic scriptures, move faster or with less contention?

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.  Pipes breaks down some of the massive hurdles Islam has to leap over in order to embrace democratic ideals.

A point Pipes doesn't touch on is how the modern Western world has treated the various Islamist movements it has run into over the last 50 years.  Since Sayyid Qutb gave birth to the modern jihadist movement, elements of the West have been bombarded by various facets of Islamic violence.  Whether it has come in the form of stateless entities like al-Qaeda, belligerent theocratic governments or a combination of the two is beside the point. 

So how have the elites in America reacted to the decades-long aggression of expansionist Islam?  Accomodation, moral equivalence and feckless dhimmitude.  Among other pathetic reactions.  Then we wonder why Islam continues to pick on us. 

Non-Muslims can't do much to reform to Islam.  As Pipes notes, that kind of wrenching cultural shift takes a long time.  Democratization is not something the West will be capable of accelerating very much. 

But that doesn't mean the West has to lay down and accept terrorist Islam's deranged premises about the separation of church and state, the role of women, property rights or religious pluralism.  Nor does it have to tolerate the violent acts of murder and mayhem the Qutbist keep throwing at us.  Instead of that, the West could decide to tell Islam--through words and deeds--that certain things won't be tolerated.  Like honor killings, imposition of sharia, the crushing of religious minorities or female circumsicion.

Would that turn Islam into a religion that welcomes democratic reform?  Probably not.  But it would probably be better than the subtle message of approval some in the West insist on sending to Islam. 

New Year, New Congress, New Chances (KingShamus)

Two perspectives for the future.

First, Glenn Reynolds on what the GOP should do in 2011:

...ignore the press. The establishment media still have their power, but they've never been weaker, and they're perceived by an ever-greater percentage of Americans as simply an arm of the political-class Democratic Party. If you pay attention, they have power over you. If you do what you think is right, they don't.

Historically speaking, this seems to be the hardest thing for many Republicans inside the Beltway to do. 

The social scene in Washington DC is chock full of soft (and hard) statists.  If it was up to the swells at the Washington Post, the federal government would always grow.  And really, why should any of the smart set in the media-government complex want conservative governance?  Getting back to a limited constitutionally based federal apparatus would mean the end of the taxpayer funded gravy train.

The other thing that the incoming Republicans must realize is that the media hates them.  Not 'dislikes'.  Not even 'disagrees with'.  Hates.  A freshman GOP congressman might get a few invitations to DC cocktail parties if he votes against some piece of conservative legislation.  Attending those soirees comes at a cost.  The very necessary reform of our government will be stymied, of course.  More importantly for the Republican gadfly, hanging with the Washington kool kid set means being a slave to their whims.  The media only loves GOPers when they take a crap on Righties.  Once the apostate Representative votes for right-of-center programs, the big media folks will turn off their Strange New Respect.

Next, Jay Cost has some sic transit gloria mundi-style words:

...what's most memorable about the 1946 election is that it wasn't a harbinger of a post-New Deal realignment.  Two years later, the Republicans were swept out of power as thoroughly as they had been swept in, and apart from a brief and bare majority at the beginning of the Eisenhower administration, they wouldn't recapture a House majority until they were led by a guy named Newt.  What happened?

One major reason for the GOP's failure to retain the majority was the response of the Democratic party to the results of 1946, wherein the party moved quickly to outflank the GOP on the Communist issue.  It's no coincidence that Americans for Democratic Action -- a liberal interest group that was resolutely anti-Communist -- was founded in January 1947 just as the 80th Congress convened.  President Truman fought the Republicans tooth and nail on domestic politics over the next two years, but on foreign affairs he and the Republicans, led by Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg, hammered out a bipartisan policy that would remain in place more or less for the next quarter century.  What's more, under the advice of his political counselors, he also went after Henry Wallace, the former cabinet secretary and vice president whom Truman had fired after he publicly promoted a soft stance on the Soviets.  Wallace's third party candidacy in 1948 was just what Truman needed to push most of the Soviet sympathizers out of the Democratic coalition, thus undermining one of the major Republican arguments from 1946.

The GOP's big pick ups during the 2010 midterm elections happened--in part--because voters are nervous about galloping Obama style liberalism.  There is a deep concern amongst the citizenry about runaway spending, crippling debt, long term unemployment and the perception that government is incompetent when dealing with real world problems.  In early January, it seems impossible that Obama and the Democrats could outmaneuver the GOP on the small-government/entitlement reform/jobs front.  But it is very possible.  The Republicans aren't known as 'The Stupid Party' for nothing. 

If the GOP lets Democrats retake the high ground, they will forfeit a massive opportunity.  They will throw away the nation's best--and possibly last--chance to get America back to a Constitutional framework.  Worse for the GOP, they'll irreparably damage their small government brand.  There are already more than a few conservatives who don't trust the Republicans as it is.  Let the GOP go back to their Hastert-era big stupid spendaholic ways and you can almost garauntee the formation of a right-wing third party.

The Republicans can take bold solid steps to reform the federal government.  Or they can devolve and die.  The choice is in their hands.   

Withering Liberalism (KingShamus)

Or...whither liberalism?

The political composition of U.S. adults held fairly steady in 2010 compared with 2009. Conservatives remained the largest group, followed by moderates and then liberals. At 35%, the percentage of moderates has declined to a new low, highlighting the increased political polarization that has occurred over the past decade.

 

...While the political pendulum in Washington can swing widely, Americans' political ideology, like their party identification, tends to shift more gradually. Such a shift has been underway in recent years. While the changes are not large, they are unmistakable. Moderates are growing fewer in number while the percentages of conservatives and liberals have expanded. Conservatism has gained ground among Republicans and independents, while the growth in liberalism is strictly among Democrats.

 

Liberals will look at the Gallup poll and have an immediate response:  "What about 2008?  Liberalism won in that year."

Sure about all that, Nancy?  Obama ran as a sane, cool-headed moderate.  Conservatives warned that St. Barry was a flaming lefty, but most voters either couldn't be bothered to dig too deeply into Obama's troubling ideological pedigree or just didn't think it was that big a deal considering the Bamster's GOP opponent.  In 2008, Republican George Bush was presiding over a crumbling economy and two foreign wars, one of which was fairly unpopular.  John McCain ran a weak-willed feckless campaign that did much to alienate and demoralize his very necessary conservative base.  When he did do something right--like pick Sarah Palin for VP--the campaign promptly misused that most valuable asset when it couldn't afford even the slightest mistake.  If the Democrats couldn't win big in that electoral year, they were never going to score a major victory.

Again, how did the Donkey-Punchers get their wins in '08 and '06? (I throw 2006 in because it set the table for the unified Democrat government of the last two years.)  They ran guys such as Bob Casey, Jon Tester and James Webb, men who could pull off a fake-o-la centrist political stance when needed.  Look at the Democrat campaign messages in those years.  'Open, honest, transparent government'.  'Most ethical congress ever.'  '95% of Americans will see a tax cut.'  The self-description we got from the Democrats in 2006-2008 could be summed up as: "We're in the middle of the road and we're not Bush. Pretty please vote for us and we'll be your BFF's." 

By the fall of 2008, Dubya was seen as ideologically brittle and only slightly more popular than raw sewage, shin splints and homelessness.  Running in the middle while opposing Bush was smart strategy for the Democrats.  However, while it may have been the politically intelligent move, it was not--and is not--what anybody would consider openly left-wing.   

Liberalism did not win in 2006.  It did not win in 2008.  Instead, it cloaked itself in moderation, a reasonable tone and...in the case of Barack Obama... a pretty princess visage.  While the Left bided it's time, George Bush, Denny Hastert and most of the elected GOPers busied themselves with soiling the party's small government brand.  

Once the Left ascended in 2008, with it's big congressional majorities and an ideologically copacetic presidency, how did it govern?  Like progressive statists, of course.  Now, if liberalism were truly on the rise, why did America's left-of center party get creamed in the off-year elections of 2009 and subsequently pummelled in the 2010 midterms?

The Gallup poll gives us some very important lessons about American politics.  First, it shows just how aberrational the 2008 election was in relation to the ideology of the America electorate.  More importantly, the Gallup data indicates that US voters will be potentially quite receptive to conservative policy initiatives if these ideas are articulated and fought for with vigor.  

Cross-Posted at Blog De KingShamus.  Big ups to the rad Baldilocks for letting me hang out and post here.

Information and Reformation

After I posted Discover the Networks’ “The Muslim Brotherhood’s Strategic Goal for North America” on my Facebook page, one of my friends--a friend in real life--pointed out that Christianity has history of conquest and forced conversion as well.

I don’t mean to pick on my friend, but I felt it necessary to reiterate my response here (edited):

[In order for an individual to examine the tenets of his/her faith], one must look at the foundational work establishing that faith.

Before the Bible was made available to the everyday Christian, the Church leadership--meaning the Catholic Church--dispensed doctrine interpreted in whatever manner it saw fit.  After Johannes Gutenberg, the Bible was made available to all who could read it.  It is no accident that Christianity was radically transformed and Reformed after that.

The same is happening to Islam with respect its adherents and its doctrines.

One of the Founders of these two religions commanded his followers to love God with all one's heart, soul, strength and mind and to love one's neighbor as self; the other commanded his followers to convert non-believers at the point of the sword or make them pay the unbelievers' tax.

As each set of followers have become more and more familiar with the foundational doctrines of the two sets of religious belief, they have begun to behave more and more in accordance to those doctrines: one set has become less totalitarian almost to the point of zero and the other more aggressive and violent.

The Bible and the Koran are objective documents with historical contexts readily available in this information age.  It is up to the individual to make himself/herself familiar enough with both--if desired--in order to come to a cogent conclusion.

My friend mentions the genocides committed in the name of Jesus. Of course, the crimes of the prior millennium’s Christian missionaries are well-known and acknowledged:

Christian missionaries of Europe fell into error and sin back when they were bent on converting the natives of all lands--not by the act and desire of leading others to Christ, but by making Christianity about something other than Him, His Sacrifice, Resurrection and the purpose thereof.  The missionaries bound up Christ in themselves and their own ethnicity.

[Edited also.  I can’t help myself.]

Those crimes do not take anything away from the quality of the Gospel; they only speak to the quality of the human beings preaching it.  Again, were such missionaries following the Bible or ignoring the inconvenient parts when they trampled non-Christian cultures?

This subject reminds me of my assertion that it’s necessary to be able to analyze information rather than simply to gather it.  The will and ability to do this has become essential—not just to "win" an argument, but for personal and national survival.

Keep watch.

Yamasaki's Towers

It bears repeating on today of all days--building sound structures requires work, planning, wisdom and inspiration. Most importantly, a climate must exist in which all of these attributes may flourish:

After years of negotiations, debate, and drawing up and redrawing up of plans, it was decided that the World Trade Center would consist of 15 million square feet of floor space distributed among seven buildings. These would include two towers that would soar over a quarter mile into the sky. The towers would top the Empire State Building by 100 feet. Some people, architects among them, wondered: Could such lofty skyscrapers be built?

'Yes' was the answer of at least one man; one who blossomed in the climate called America:

Minoru Yamasaki was born to Japanese immigrant parents in Seattle in 1912 and studied architecture at the University of Washington in 1932. He then moved to New York to complete his professional education, and established a practice in suburban Detroit, Michigan, in 1945. Yamasaki designed several major Seattle buildings including the Federal Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center, 1962), IBM Building (1964), and Rainier Square and tower (1977). He is best known as the chief architect of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City. Upon completion in 1976, the WTC’s twin 110-story towers were the world’s tallest buildings. Yamasaki died of cancer in 1986, and was thus spared seeing his greatest work destroyed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

During WWII, Yamasaki and his parents were protected from FDR's internment by his second employer, Smith, Hinchman, and Grylls.

Allegories and ironies abound.

While his Japanese kinsmen were acting against Americans, Chinese, Filipinos, etc. based on the assumption that the former were ethnically superior, Yamasaki, the American, was living his life according to the American ideal of individual excellence--even as FDR's America was falling monstrously short of that ideal.  And it is pertinent that it took individuals to protect the Yamasakis from their government; for self-interested reasons to be sure, but how much does that matter in view of the results?

The Japanese and persons of Japanese descent (and other East Asians) have a well-deserved reputation for excellence in most any endeavor and it is no secret that this excellence seems to stem from elements of the Japanese culture.  Like very many other ethnic groups, Japanese immigrants to the United States came to America with their cultural baggage--both good and bad--and did what successful new Americans do: they adapted.  They retained the elements of their culture which are compatible with the American Ideal (individual excellence), discarded those elements which were not (ethnic tribalism/supremacy) and, for the most part, passed on the positives to their wholly American progeny.

Yamasaki's Twin Towers were a testament to that success and to the soundness of the American Ideal.

It is indeed a blessing that he did not live to see his masterpieces destroyed by those who hold ethnic and religious tribalism more sacred than individuality, but though Yamasaki and his Towers reside only in our memories now, nothing can destroy what that fine American achieved in a climate created just for men and women like him.

[Re-edited]

(Image courtesy of the Detroit News)

A Reminder of the Other Black Genocide (UPDATE)

In 2008, I posted the following video via YouTube. It had been part of a series which exposed the truth about the Islamic Civilization with special emphasis on the horrors of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade.  My intent was to counter the exhortations of Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and the like-minded who continue to excoriate America and the rest of Western Civilization for past sins against black African Slaves and Americans of African descent.

The owners of YouTube, however, have blocked the account of John Alembillah Azumah--the man interviewed in the series and the author of the book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue. One can guess that some people were offended by the series--a state of affairs which often occurs when the truth is told.

This particular copy of the video, entitled "Muslim Black Slavery - Islam Slave History of Black Africa," is now posted at MetaCafe by a third party.

Here's Azumah's preamble:

The success of Mohammedan Islam in deceiving, misinforming, deforming and contorting both history and reality over a period of almost fourteen hundred years has been astounding--that is, until now.

The greatest tragedy about this particular subject is that most of the descendants of African slavery--the black people in the Americas, around the world, as well as among the African blacks--are totally ignorant of the actual facts.

Before we lose the concentration of our visitors, I would like to make the following statement and then prove it: that the worst, most inhumane and most diabolical of the black African Slave Trade was initiated, refined, perpetrated and implemented by the Mohammedan Arabs and, later, aided and abetted by the black converts to Mohammedan Islam.

I predict that, as usual, the two subcultures--those of denial of facts and of Political Correctness--will attack us without once disproving a single statement and/or conclusion that we make.

And here are some pertinent excerpts:

While the European involvement in the African Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the Americas lasted for just over three centuries, the Arab involvement in the African Slave Trade has lasted fourteen centuries and, in some parts of the Mohammedan world, is still continuing to this day.

(...)

It should also be noted that black slaves were castrated based on the assumption that the blacks had an ungovernable sexual appetite.

(...)

A comparison of the Islamic Slave Trade to the American Slave Trade reveals some extremely interesting contrasts.

While two out of every three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, the proportions were reversed in the Islamic Slave Trade: two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims.

While the mortality rate of slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as ten percent, the percentage of slaves dying in transit in the Trans-Sahara[n] and East African Slave market was a staggering eighty to ninety percent.

(...)

While many children were born to slaves in the Americas--the millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the United States of today--very few descendants of the slaves that ended up in the Middle East survived.

While most slaves who went to the Americas could marry and have families, most of the male slaves destined for the Middle East were castrated and most of the children born to the women were killed at birth.

Azumah pronounces the denial of the facts concerning the on-going Islamic Slave Trade as 'obscene.'

To those whose male ancestors survived American Slavery long enough to ensure that the former would be alive in the twenty-first century and, therefore, be able to refer to me as a House Negro for suspecting the motives of the putative builders of the "Ground Zero" Mosque, I feel pity.

That pity is mixed with a sense of astonishment, however, at this conclusion: that so many black people are so well indoctrinated with perpetual anger at the sins of America's past, that they would ignore the more egregious sins of Islam's present and desired future.  Hurling epithets and pretending that the opponents of the "Ground Zero" Mosque want to stifle freedom of religion is a lot easier than gathering the pertinent facts, connecting them, analyzing them and coming to a cogent conclusion, it seems.

On the other hand, perhaps such people have indeed concluded that Islam would like to expand its decimation of those of African descent--with black men being the special and specified targets for annihilation.  Perhaps the slinging of epithets, etc. is merely a smokescreen--an insurance for the future.  Such people will be able to say to their future masters, "see? I stood up for the Ummah against that infidel, Ochieng."

Maybe such people are merely trying to protect their own testicles--such as they are.

Enslave a man's mind and the rest of him--including his testicles-- will follow; no more need for physical chains.

UPDATE: John Alembillah Azumah's bonafides: he is the Director of the Centre for Islamic Studies at the London School of Theology.  I would imagine that he has competent security and, no doubt, he is in need of our prayers.

The Herding, Part Two

Over at Ace’s, there’s a commenter who continually tells Ace’s presumably mostly white readership that it’s pointless to go on about the history of race relations in this country and that white Americans should simply join the battle which the Obama Administration and the organized Left are trying to provoke.  When I responded with a condensed version of how black American social and political allegiance has been manipulated over the past ten decades, he stated that a people who could be so easily (sic) manipulated must really be inferior.

This man demonstrates the type of limited perspective that I sketched out in Part One and, actually, his type could have furnished me with an additional bullet point; not only is he unable to think strategically, he actually rebukes the notion that such analysis has any value.  Moreover, such a person is blind to how his own thinking and emotional state have been shaped and molded by Leftist ideology in a much shorter time span than was so for black Americans.

In this second part, my purpose is to detail another tactical weapon of the Left, the purpose of which has been to instill a set of attitudes in the minds of the American populace; in this case, the mindset is meant for white Americans.

If the Left has been successful at keeping racial grievance in the forefront of black American agenda—in indoctrinating black Americans into believing that retaining racial anger at whites is inherent in being black and essential for black survival--it has also been successful in later years of producing a certain mindset in white Americans.  Actually this seems to be two mindsets, but it is really a singular one—a two-headed beast.  The first is guilt-fear and the second is unproductive anger.

The Herding, Part One

From American Thinker:

 

The proper purpose of law is to use the power of its collective force to stop this tendency to plunder instead of work. The law should protect property and punish plunder. The law, whether made by one man or one group of men, operates with the sanction and support of a dominating force, and this force must be entrusted to those who make the laws. Legal plunder occurs when the law takes from one person and gives to another. The law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. If such a law is not abolished, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system. 

Have you noticed that there are some people—many people--who have no concept of time?  No, I’m not referring to the chronically tardy, though I do suspect that many of them fall into the categories of which I’m about to outline.

Those to whom I’m referring do not have a concept of the following; they are

• Unable to consider individual events from the past as anything but singular and isolated occurrences, e.g. unable to connect those events with each other and—further--with contemporaneous, on-going events,
• Unable to use known, available and pertinent information/ideas to analyze the sum (or, to use a better mathematical term, the product) of events in order to come to a plausible conclusion as to what is going, and
• Unable to take that conclusion and reasonably project what may happen in the future.

The ability to do this is called strategic thinking—the ability to recognize patterns and figure out what is true and what is false.  Most of the time, this inability has nothing to do with IQ and can be selective and temporary.  I believe that, in the latter two types of cases, the inability is due to a syndrome to which almost all of us are prone: wishful-thinking.

Many do not want to or cannot put together the events which have lead this country to its present state, much less come to a reasonable conclusion.  However, I don't fall into either category.  Believe me, sometimes I wish I did.

But the more I learn about the history of the twentieth century, the more I consider it against what is known about human nature, the more I observe the state in which this country finds itself in at present--the more I believe that the peril anticipated by all too many observers, was planned by the Left.

Repost: Why is the Black Vote in the Democrats' Pocket?

I wrote the following op-ed for Pajamas Media on July 30, 2008. Since one still sees many asking this very same question, I think that a re-post is appropriate. It is slightly edited from the original version; I can't help myself. 

********

A few weeks back, I lambasted prominent black conservatives for even thinking of voting for Barack Obama, a man who embodies only one part of the two-word description “black conservative.” Several black conservatives were quoted in the article to which I was responding. However, the most revealing quote came from former U.S. Representative J.C. Watts:

J.C. Watts, a former Oklahoma congressman who once was part of the GOP House leadership, said he’s thinking of voting for Obama. Watts said he’s still a Republican, but he criticizes his party for neglecting the black community. Black Republicans, he said, have to concede that while they might not agree with Democrats on issues, at least that party reaches out to them.

“And Obama highlights that even more,” Watts said, adding that he expects Obama to take on issues such as poverty and urban policy. “Republicans often seem indifferent to those things.”

Watts’ turnaround suggests one of three things to me: 1) that he has changed his political philosophy and should probably change parties; 2) that when he was running for office he was saying what he needed to say to get elected in conservative Republican Oklahoma, rather than saying that in which he believed; that is, he was never really a conservative Republican; or 3) that he realizes the futility of trying to attract most black Americans to his party on the basis of principle.

I don’t know which is the answer, but there’s a logic to Watts’ statement regarding Obama and that logic undergirds the astounding Democrat/liberal/Left success among the black electorate in contrast with the Right’s failure in the same area. The key to understanding lies in the assumptions inherent in the phrase “reaching out.” Who should reach out to whom on the basis of what? What smaller actions fall under the large umbrella of “reaching out”? Here are the blanks filled in:

1. Who: the Republican Party should do the reaching out.
2. To whom: the party should reach out to the black community, that is, to black people as a singular entity — a collective.
3. How: the outreach should be done on the same basis as it is performed by the modern Democratic Party.

1. Programs
2. Policies

In short, the Republican Party must “do things” for black Americans which it does not do for other citizens and which are identical to the things that the Democratic Party does. Or better. But the Republican Party can’t be what it isn’t.

The bottom line: Republicans want black Americans to pursue happiness and the Democratic Party wants to provide happiness to black Americans.

A party and its principles

The Republican Party that Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan (re)built has not been designed to reach out to a group on the basis of identity, but on the basis of a given group’s ideas and values. By the party’s very definition — its basic principles — this precludes reaching out to groups which have race, ethnicity, or gender as their sole criterion for coalescing as a political entity. So when some observers wonder what the Republican Party is going to “do for” the “black community,” most Republicans will have a certain look of puzzlement on our faces, as if someone just asked why we don’t offer attachable wings so that our prospective party members can fly.

Many black Americans cannot shake the notion that a political party is supposed to provide quid pro quo. That the Republican Party won’t do anything for them besides get off their backs, get other citizens off their backs, and get out of their way so they can pursue happiness just isn’t good enough. But where did the idea come from?

The idea that the government should step in when overt oppression is being practiced but should not help or hinder black American advancement certainly precedes Buckley, Goldwater, and Reagan. And, in practice, as Bruce Bartlett (H/T Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred) and La Shawn Barber point out, before the Civil War and during the century that followed the abolition of slavery, the Republican Party was responsible for several federal measures designed to protect Americans of African descent from their fellow citizens and to punctuate the basic citizenship rights guaranteed to the freed slaves and to their progeny. Fact is, however, the Republican Party would not have had a leg to stand on had not the founders of the United States based the principles in the Constitution on certain philosophies.

Obviously, black Americans were happy to receive the protection. However, after the Republicans clamped down on the racists, they (mostly) removed themselves from the equation to allow the country’s black citizens to be free. But when they did that, the nemeses fell in, masquerading as friends.

It is here that black Americans found themselves attacked from the top and from the bottom. Forty years ago most black Americans were used to being physically and socially restrained to an extent. However, what happened to black Americans in the 60s is that their enemies found a way to accomplish what the physical barriers of slavery, the legal oppression of northern segregation, and the overt terror of Jim Crow could not.

The mental chains

At the top, President Lyndon Baines Johnson — a Democrat whose pre-Kennedy legislative career had been that of a typical Dixiecrat — put forth a set of programs and policies infamously known as the Great Society, actually giving a part of the public funding to those who qualified to receive it. The bottom line? Many of the programs amounted to life subsidy — “reward” for indolence, whoredom, and irresponsibility. At the bottom, liberals, leftists, and Democrats inserted themselves wholesale into the educational processes of the black poor. That education put forth a portrait of America as a full-scale villain, which made her history unneeded — except the parts necessary to understand the crimes perpetrated on her perennial victims. With that in mind, why would liberals, leftists, and Democrats teach their captive audience about the historical role that their political opponents played in setting and keeping them free? Between the manipulation of education and the government handouts by Democrats, the Left could even convince black Americans that it was the Republicans who had actually been black America’s oppressors — and that idea, that lie, would become far more useful to the Democrats than any Great Society program, as LBJ allegedly foresaw.

An even more serious deficiency has been nurtured by the systems dominated by leftist philosophies of education, and that deficiency leads us, finally, to the answer to our question.

Too few people put enough thinking into principles — their nature or, of utmost importance, their foundation. As a matter of fact, what many people call principles aren’t really that, but are commodities — items to be bought and sold. And it is one’s principles — or one’s commodities — that inform the decision as to whom one should give his/her allegiance.

Example: consider the admonition to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Or is it “do unto others as you suspect they would do unto you”? Or “do unto others before they do unto you”? Or “do unto others as they’ve already done unto you and not one minute before they do”?

Like all other axioms, the Golden Rule has its origin in a way of thinking, a school of thought — a philosophy, in this case, biblical. One forms his/her principles from a philosophy, usually one or several taught at school and/or at home. Now I can’t speak for what is taught in all homes, only my own. However, I can authoritatively say that few bases for forming principles — as opposed to commodities — were taught at the public schools I attended in South Central Los Angeles. Barely were the particulars of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and our Bill of Rights covered. Of course we had heard the phrase “unalienable rights,” but what did that mean, really? And the men who formed these words, these ideas, and built a nation on top of them, where did they get these ideas about rights and government from? Did they just pop up, unbidden? Or were the men simply building on the philosophies of someone(s) else?

Who knew the answers to these questions? Not I; not then. Where I went to school, one was taught what to think, but not how and definitely not why. One was not taught how to build a foundation for one’s principles or that a foundation even needed to be built.

Into that vacuum jump many notions, but the one specific to the subject at hand is the idea that the party which is giving you the most things — the one that will “do something for you” — is the party to which you should belong. And if “principles” have no foundation, those “principles” — and their owners — can be purchased. And though there are a few black so-called conservative Republicans out there, all too many of them — like Watts — still find themselves reverting to the “do something for us” idea, a liberal Democrat ideal. No wonder some believe that conservative political persuasion is grounded in advantage rather than principle.

The Democratic Party has counted on this absence — of history taught/learned and of principles adhered to — in all of its members, but most especially has it counted on this dearth in black Americans, a dearth which has allowed too many black Americans to stick themselves to the Democratic Party like glue, or chain themselves to the party like …

The Democrats should take pride in a job well done.

Scarred Souls: More About Abortion

The Confession I posted on June 9, 2010 couldn't just stand as is was, mainly since it was an answer to a specific question, "Should Black Women Stop Getting Abortions."

Of course all women should stop having abortions.  But since the question singled out black women, and since that conversation is between two black American women, myself and Jessica Ann Mitchell, and since we find the state of the black American family in near death, I felt it necessary to tailor my further response to black Americans.

The first part of my response has already been publicized here, but I posted the following originally in a Facebook note. For that reason, I will only post here what I deem to be the second part of the answer.  There might be a little preaching.  That's an essential part of me.  He's a part of me.

A Birthday and Independence

Today has always been a special day for me. Yes, I celebrate the anniversary of the birth of the country in which I have survived and thrived. However, today is also the birthday of my great-aunt, Alma Jenkins Simpkins.

Today she is eighty-nine and she is the last surviving of and has experienced the most years of all of her siblings. She is the seventh of eight; she had four brothers and three sisters. Her lone younger sibling, my grandmother, went to live in the next world in 2008.

The four elder siblings were born in Mississippi and the rest were born in Oklahoma.

Her father and three of the four brothers died young--violent deaths, One, William, was executed for murder by the state of Arkansas. (William's race is listed as 'Native American' and they are, certifiably, one quarter Indian.)

Aunt Alma's eldest brother and three sisters died of diseases of the spirit--one cannot say that any of them were unpreventable: un-medicated high blood pressure and untreated cancers.

All of them were wild men and women, something I know both from reputation and from observation. Aunt Alma says that her father and all of her brothers carried a handgun on their persons wherever they went and weren't afraid to use them. She says that white people called her mother and her sisters "Mrs." and "Miss" in 1930s Oklahoma.

Last night, I made a green salad, and today I have cooked her an extensive breakfast, something not normally done because of her high blood pressure. Later, I'll prepare macaroni and cheese and broil slabs of boneless ribs. Aunt Alma will probably have a beer. And, of course, there is ice cream and cake.

Then, we're going to start a conversation--something which is now sometimes difficult due to her teeth. It will be a conversation about the men of our family who died before I was born--men who took their independence seriously and, sometimes, paid dearly.

Thoughts on the Anniversary of D-Day

¹Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:

 ²And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:

 ³And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

Genesis 12:1-3 (KJV)

Isn’t it interesting that Europe finds itself in financial straits and that some on the continent are lamenting the gradual incursion of Islam in very many of its countries?

From reading Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope (I read it years before Glenn Beck recommended it), I discovered what a death toll World War One had taken on the population of its European participants.  Present-day protesters against the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have committed serial seppuku over the type of casualties taken in any single battle of the Great War—the great numbers of dead being caused by contemporaneous weapons combined with American Civil War-era tactics.  Then there were the civilian casualties.  Overwhelming to ponder at the time, no doubt, but small potatoes compared to what was to come a few years after the “War to End All Wars.”

Europeans murdered each other thoroughly in that war, in World War Two, in between the wars and afterward. They did so via gas chambers, ovens, starvation and government prison camps and most of them viciously turned on the Jews using the means stated.  Because of that--and abortion--there have not been enough indigenous Europeans left to reproduce and, thereby, fund the welfare states in which they so desperately believe and which are become their undoing.  So they had to invite in immigrants from Africa and Asia--mostly Muslim.

And therein lies the interesting part.  Murdered Jews—the monetary experts and culture of Europe--who would have reproduced to populate a far stronger and more admirable Europe, IMO--have been replaced by those who hate both Jews and non-Muslim white Europeans and who reproduce at a far greater rate than do their hosts.  And the kicker is that the white post-Christian Europeans invited in their would-be conquerors.

The children and grandchildren of those who coveted Jewish possessions will soon be in a struggle with those who simultaneously claim that there was no Holocaust and who long to perpetrate the next one.  No, hatred doesn't have to make sense.

That struggle will be over possession of a land which is covered with the ashes of the Jews.

You don't think God doesn't keep his promises?  Think again.

Great Black Patriots in the House of Representatives

UPDATE (4/4/2010): Welcome Instapundit readers and...Happy Resurrection Day!

In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War and during what is known as the Reconstruction period, sixteen black American men—several of them former slaves--served in the US House of Representatives with most being from states of the former Confederacy.  All were quite literate and some were self-educated.  What is certain is that these men saw hardship and racism that most of us 21^st century brats of all colors cannot begin to conjure. 

What is also certain is that each of these men were Republicans and for a very good reason: the Democrat Party of that time was the self-described Party of Slavery and remained the Party of Black Oppression long after.  (Arguably, this legacy continues.)

Linked here are the fascinating biographies of each congressman and some of the speeches the men gave during the debates for the Civil Rights Act of 1871—also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act—and the  Civil Rights Act of 1875.

The site linked is called Neglected Voices and the voices of these men have indeed been neglected but the title is so…weak.  These men were anything but weak, hence the title of this post.  I’m sure, however, that they’ve been spinning in their graves of late at the words and deeds of those for whom they set precedent.

These men didn’t have to invent tales of racial epithets hurled or of racial violence; such were their constant companions throughout their lives.  Yet they did more than muddle through life, they soared.  These were real men, not victims; our current crop of representatives looks microscopic next to them

At any rate, here’s an excerpt of a speech from Richard H. Cain (pdf), in which he contradicts overt assertions by his white colleagues  regarding the black race’s alleged inferiority:

Why Black Americans Think That the Federal Government is Our Friend

While hanging out yesterday at Ace's yesterday as he was flogging racists, I happened to mention that many if not most black Americans view the federal government as beneficial and friendly.  Some other commenters were surprised and I was surprised at their surprise, because it isn't difficult to figure out why this is.  Whether it's the Emancipation or the desegregation of the Armed Forces or Brown v. Board or the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, the federal government for the most part had seemed to be on the side of the black American as his constitutional rights were being oppressed by state or local governments.

What needs to be spelled, however is what the federal government did in the above-mentioned areas: it legally removed obstacles to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of Americans who are black.  And that is what it was supposed to do.

The present problem in my unlearned opinion is this: the federal government began overstepping its bounds during the Great Depression and did so most infamously in the late sixties via the Great Society programs.  Doing more that getting local racists out of the way, the federal government sought to and succeeded in making itself the suppliers of life, liberty and, putatively, the happiness of many black Americans.  (Try telling a senior of any race that Social Security is sending the country to financial ruin. You'll get an earful about her "rights".) 

And even many black Americans who do not rely on the federal government still view the fed as our friend because of that history.

What's needed in order to change this perception is obvious: education--not a new education but the old one, one which contains an objective explanation of the role of government.

Simply put, the role of the American government is to remove obstacles to liberty of the People--even when that obstacle is American government itself.  Supplying all of one's needs is not government's role.  That's God's purview.

We all remember President Obama's statement containing the assertion that one of the flaws of the US Constitution was that is only contained a  list of "negative rights," meaning negative government "rights."  The idea that a Harvard-trained lawyer thinks that the government has rights or that there was no list of positive responsibilities assigned to government was mockable.  (Hey, you voted for him.)

But what the statement betrayed was a widespread misconception present in those of us who aren't lawyers of any variety of a friendly fed whose role is to insert itself between God and man's liberty and to redistribute wealth (aka stealing).  The notion that the founders "forgot" to address this is hilarious.

So when the Democrats came to full power this year, they began to build on the foundation that Democrat Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson laid.  The good news?  Between Socialized Medicine, Cap and Trade, TARP, etc., the federal government's active role in overstepping its bounds--in crippling America--is opening the eyes of Americans of all races.  The bad news: there may not be an America left when the federal locusts finish.

UPDATE: Hi, Glenn's readers!

Don't Go Back to Sleep

 USS West Virginia, December 7 1941

Berlin Wall Tumbled Down

I can’t believe it has been 20 years since I sat here in the USA watching my friends on TV as they scale a previously untouchable Berlin Wall.  I had left what was then West Berlin not a month before.  Talk about the worst timing in the world!

President Obama isn’t in Germany this time—perhaps he thinks that he has traveled to Europe enough for one year—but Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is there and appears to be getting on quite well with German Chancellor Angela Merkel (a former East German physicist).

My old Berlin friends and I plan to have our reunion this February, but I think that an adult beverage of choice should be lifted today in honor of those who helped shake the foundation of the Wall and bring it down—including, most notably, one Ronald W. Reagan who, in his famous 1987 visit, exhorted last USSR head of state Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear Down This Wall.” President Reagan seemed to speak the Wall’s destruction into reality. 

It says in the Bible that believers can do that.  I just report.  You decide.™

UPDATE:  President Obama gave a video address for the celebration in Berlin.  Appropriate considering present events, but he was unable to resist making it about him.

“Few would have foreseen … that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it,” Obama said.

What I'm Reading (October 8, 2009)

Airlift to America: How Barack Obama Sr., John F. Kennedy, Tom Mboya and 800 East African Students Changed Their world and Ours by Tom Schachtman

To refresh your memories, the Tom Mboya Airlift is the endeavor that brought Barack Obama Senior and hundreds of other young Kenyans to America to be given Western higher education and to return to their home and be prepared to lead their nation in the wake of its independence from the United Kingdom.

Before you curse the day that fate brought Barack Obama Sr. to America, don't forget that if the Airlift hadn't occurred, I wouldn't exist either.

One of the many disconcerting facts that I've run across since discovering the existence of Barack Obama Jr. is how much the students of the Mboya airlift were nurtured and supported by prominent individuals of the hard Left of that era and this one--Cora Weiss of the Institute for Policy Studies and entertainer Harry Belafonte, to give a pair of seemingly divergent examples.

When I mentioned this to my mother, she said "oh yes, Roosevelt [University, Chicago where my parents met] was crawling with Communists back then."  Mom never quite saw the attraction of Leftism, lucky blessedly for me and my siblings.

However, one can't imagine how eerie it is to feel as though your existence was engineered by someone other than God and one's parents.

History of the Future (UPDATED)

Today is the 70th Anniversary of the invasion of Poland by the Soviet Union.  Following close on the heels of the invasion of the country by Hitler's Germany on September 1, 1939, this resulted in the disappearance of Poland until the aftermath of the Allied victory in World War II.

Do you think that President Obama knew this history before deciding to break America's agreement with Poland and the Czech Republic?  Neither do I.

But I bet that his puppeteers advisers did.  And I'm 100 percent sure that Vladimir Putin is celebrating.

(Thanks to Gabriel Malor)

PREVIOUSLY: I Can't Decide

UPDATE: Happy Judas Molotov-Ribbentrop Day!   Jules Crittenden notes the bitter irony of events and has some excellent links at the end on the history of World War II's beginning.

UPDATE: Arthur Chrenkoff reminds us of how savage were hallmarks of the the 20th century: the tribal wars and genocides of Europe.

Awesome (UPDATED)

Watching the 9/12 Tea Party Protest on Fox Interactive.  Godspeed to them all.

UPDATE: Who's there?

Stephen Green the VodkaPundit

Stacy McCain

UPDATE: 1.5 million in attendance.

God love Senator Jim Demint (R-SC).  I never thought I'd say that about a U.S Senator.

UPDATE:  Live Webcam.  And Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) can't seem to find the word 'Czar' in the U.S. Constitution.

(Thanks to Ace of Spades HQ who has a couple of breathtaking photos.)

UPDATE: From VodkaPundit:

 

That's pretty much the case.  Once you folks who object to the government redistributing your money to others realize this, you'll be truly free.

UPDATE: A NYC firefighter who responded to the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 reminds us that people are still dying from the diseases that come from inhaling the remains of two disintegrated office buildings and two destroyed jet aircraft.

UPDATE:  I think we've just heard a coinage: Million Patriot March.

UPDATE: Highlights (via Michelle Malkin)

UPDATE:  A whole load of photos are here.  A million people, easily.

UPDATE: I can't wait to see what the ground covered looks like afterward--certainly no worse than did the National Mall following Presidential Inauguration Day 2009.

UPDATE: Wow.

The Hazards of Having African Relatives

No this isn't about him.

The weirdest thing happened this morning. I received an email from my father--the African one--saying that he was in Nigeria attending a conference and that he was without money or a passport; he said that he had accidentally left them in a cab.  (Most regular readers know that my father is Kenyan journalist Philip Ochieng.)

It was the correct email address. The wording of the letter, however, seemed suspiciously generic as if were a broadcast--or a Nigerian email scam.  But I thought it was my father so I emailed back—“Okay I will help.”  Blessedly, however, I decided to Google the name of the conference.

So when the incipient scammer wrote me back with details I said “will help you, Father, but I need to know that you are who you say you are.”  Two simple questions were asked and the answer to one should have rolled off of the tips of my father's fingers.

The response?

Julieet [sic],
why are you asking such question, i want you to use the information of the Hotel manager and send what you said you have for now. i also want you to call me on this number +*************.
Get back to me with the scanned copy of the transfer receipt.

I don’t think so.  My father’s email address has been hacked.

So now I have to figure out how to let him know this. Suggestions?

UPDATE: An old friend volunteered to look up the headers and they do resolve to Nigeria.  The friend jogged my memory and I remembered that there is still an old email address of my father's lying around so we'll see whether he still has access to it.

I'm not calling there.  Arm. Leg. Firstborn.

Vengeance is His

Yes I know.  I’m just jumping back in without an explanation.  Maybe later.

President Obama seems to have a problem with our closest ally, the United Kingdom.

First there was the bust of Churchill:

A bust of the former prime minister once voted the greatest Briton in history, which was loaned to [Former President] George W Bush from the Government's art collection after the September 11 attacks, has now been formally handed back.

The bronze by Sir Jacob Epstein, worth hundreds of thousands of pounds if it were ever sold on the open market, enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office during President Bush's tenure.

But when British officials offered to let Mr Obama to hang onto the bust for a further four years, the White House said: "Thanks, but no thanks."

(Rumor has it that the president treated the bust far less ceremoniously than that.)

Then there was the president’s treatment of  UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown days ago:

Obama, breaking with precedent, wouldn't grant the prime minister the customary honor of standing beside him in front of the two nations' flags for the TV cameras. [SNIP]

Still, Brown kept a stiff upper lip as he sat in the Oval Office yesterday as Obama, skipping the usual words of welcome for his guest, went straight to questions from the news services. Brown didn't get to speak for six minutes, after Obama had already answered two questions.

Many observers seem puzzled.  I’m not and neither is the UK press.  It’s about Kenya.

If you recall, before Kenya became Kenya (1963) it was a British colony known as British East Africa.  Between 1952 and 1960, there was this little “difference of opinion” between the UK and the natives of British East Africa—primarily from the Kikuyu tribe.  That conflict is known as the Mau Mau Uprising.  There were tens of thousands of African civilians killed and, according to Wiki, seven to ten thousand Africans interned by the British colonial masters.  In Dreams from My Father, President Obama says that his grandfather was tortured by the British during the conflict, though he was not a Kikuyu but a Luo.  Guess which prime minister ordered the Mau Mau insurgency to be put down.

Mystery solved.  It seems that the president is seeking to humiliate the progeny of those who humiliated his ancestors.  Revenge isn’t that complicated a motive.

However, a question remains.  Is this any way for a President of the United States to behave?

Read also about the gifts which the Obamas gave to the Browns during the latter's visit, especially this one: a collection of 25 classic American films on DVD.  Not exactly special.  And even more curiously:  Brits can't play American DVDs.

To be fair, Prime Minister Brown was thoughtless in his gift-giving as well.  One of his gifts to the president:  a seven-volume classic biography of Churchill by Sir Martin Gilbert.  One would expect a UK Prime Minister to know the history of his own country, but one could say the same thing about our own head of state.

UPDATE: Welcome, Ace's morons!

UPDATE: Welcome all others.  Just to clear up some items, I am half Luo like President Obama (take note of my URL), born and raised in the United States.  My father and the president's father arrived in the United States via the same means--the Mboya Airlift.

For the Progeny

Uptownsteve asks:

What will you black conservatives tell your grandchildren?

It’s a question which I take to imply that, somehow, our grandchildren will presume to vilify us for voting against the man who will become the first black president of the United States. It’s a very easy question to answer, actually: we believe that political, social, moral and spiritual principles take precedence over ethnic tribalism and we followed through on that assertion. But I’m guessing that Steve needs things spelled out a bit more, so I’ll do it for him and for my great nieces and nephews and—perhaps—any grandchildren I might have through being a step-mother. Here goes.

When a voter picks a candidate to serve in an office, that voter is essentially saying “Of all the choices available, I think that this person will do a better job in that office that all of the other available candidates.” In this case we are, of course, talking about the office of President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces. We are talking about a person whose job it is to support and defend the U.S. Constitution, the American land and the American people.

In order to make that decision the American voters need information and during the campaign season we are presented with information designed to allow the voters to make an informed decision as to which of the candidates will be the most competent in fulfilling the objective particulars of that office. By November 4th, we are supposed to come to a conclusion about this matter and record that conclusion in the voting booth.

While we are evaluating all of the information which can indicate a candidate’s competency at supporting and defending the U.S. Constitution, the American land and the American people, we have to take the information we receive and decide whether that information is relevant to the particulars of the office in question. Additionally, we have to decide whether the positive information outweighs the negative. And on top of that, we have to decide which candidate’s positive-negative ratio is better than that all of the others.

I concluded that the things which I know about Barack Obama which are relevant to his possible abilities to adequately support and defend the U.S. Constitution, the American land and the American people —his political background, his expressed political/social ideas and his overall judgment were either of lower quality than John McCain’s or that those things would be overtly detrimental to the well-being of this nation. I also concluded that either man’s ethnicity/race/color was insignificant factor in making a judgment as who was able to better serve this nation and, therefore, was irrelevant to making that decision.

I made my decision by making judgments about the following:

• Barack Obama’s decisions about the Surge conducted in Iraq
• His words regarding the success of that Surge
• His words about the US Constitution in 2001
• His words to Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher.
• His voting record in the Illinois Senate
• His voting record in the US Senate
• His words about his association with domestic terrorist William Ayers
• His adherence to Black Liberation Theology as formulated by James Cone and as articulated by Jeremiah Wright, Emeritus pastor of Trinity United Church of “Christ”
• His claim to not know the nature of Wright’s theological stance and to not have heard the latter’s more incendiary sermons after sitting in the pews of Wright’s church for twenty years.
• His stance on abortion and on the “Born Alive” provision in Illinois law.
• His stated intention to conduct presidential-level negotiations with rogue heads of state
• His promise to accept public funding for his campaign

There are many more factors but I hope that I have formed a picture---I did not like Barack Obama's words and/or subsequent actions regarding the above topics. And I would state such to the younger members of my family without hesitation. And if my sisters and my brother-in-law are doing their jobs properly, their children will understand that if a presidential candidate goes against every dearly-held ideology and principle in which you believe but is your same color, it’s a no-brainer to make the decision to vote against him/her.

Because if a candidate’s political, social and moral values are an anathema to a given voter but that voter chooses that candidate anyway solely because the voter shares race/ethnicity with the candidate and/or because of historical precedent, that voter has exchanged principle for emotion and for carnality. The voter has exchanged political, moral and spiritual values for pride of tribe (blacks) or to assuage tribal guilt (whites).

And that, good sir, is the very illustration of a selling-out.

However, if one’s “principles” are for sale, I guess that’s not such a big deal. And if one has no principles, we all know what’s being exchanged, what’s being sold: one’s very person. One's soul.

I’ll tell the kids that I retained mine.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, uptownsteve is banned. Pearls, swine, you know.

UPDATE: Welcome, friends from Ace of Spades HQ!

Relative Poverty

Before today, I’ve never posted anything about Barack Obama’s half-brother, George Onyango Obama, a resident of one of Nairobi's worst slums. The reason: unlike many, I don’t think that it is automatically the senator’s responsibility to support those whom he has taken no part in creating. And even if it is discovered that there was some agreement between the two brothers, it would be one made between individual adult members of a family and, therefore, none of my business.

In contrast, I took on the responsibility of supporting Obama-Kogelo School with the assistance of many others, because a public promise was made to many children. Some of these children may have the chance to fulfill the same type of dreams which Barack Obama Sr. and Philip Ochieng had a half century ago.

I do understand why some of the senator’s political opponents have made an issue of the fact that Senator Obama has done nothing to lift his younger brother up from his degraded existence, one which is light-years removed from that of a Harvard-educated lawyer and US Senator. (And now it has been discovered that the senator has an aunt on his father’s side--Zeituni Onyango--living Boston public housing.) Senator Obama is the sponsor of the Global Poverty Act (S. 2433)—a proposed law designed to feed all the hungry children of the world and funded by American tax dollars, naturally. In other words Barack Obama would legally compel Americans to give even more to the poor of the entire world even while he made the choice not to do so for his own flesh and blood. The two stances are hypocritical on their faces. Conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza thinks so as well and has been raising money for the immigration and upkeep of George Obama.

One wonders, however, if the senator, believing that he will win next week’s election, thinks that his proposal will take care of all the George Obamas and Zeituni Onyangos of the world. Senator Obama seems to think that he can solve all of the problems of this country by forcing American workers to give their proceeds to those who cannot or will not work. Why shouldn’t the ideal be applicable worldwide?

But to me, Barack Obama’s advocacy of GPA and D’Souza’s efforts to “save” George Obama represent the same sort of futility. If the parents of the world will not do enough to feed their own children and the George Obamas of the world—especially the American ones—will not do everything in their power to improve their individual situation and that of their kinsmen and their countrymen, nothing will change. All these charitable endeavors will just be like tossing money into the furnace.

With these thoughts in mind, I am thinking of disbanding Save Senator Obama Kogelo School, Inc. Because the organization is a non-profit, I am obliged to either refund the money or donate it to another charitable organization and that’s what I am likely to do next week, but I haven't made up my mind at this point.

At any rate, it is likely that the school will be built/remodeled after the election by an organization which prefers to remain anonymous to avoid the politicization of it all. And in the event of an Obama victory I suspect that Obama kinsman Kenya Prime Minister Raila Odinga will take it upon himself to upgrade the Obama ancestral village all around. Such is the way of countries where semi-strongman politics is present—if you win, your relatives and your hometown win also.

I almost disbanded my effort immediately after reading my father’s September op-ed on D’Souza’s actions. After all, in email, he said something similar—but less stinging--to me about my effort.

[W]here was this latter-day savior before Barack appeared in the news pages? Why is it that he's only interested in helping the relative of a celebrity, whereas hunger is rasping millions of other Kenyans?

If he were a genuine savior, wouldn't he organize an institution - like Father Grol's Undugu Society - to channel publicly collected funds to benefit more human beings? Granted, he has a right to choose to help only a single individual.

As we know, this is something I actually did do.

But in the event, why not do so privately?

How is the heck are people supposed to know that they can give to a particular charity if the holder of that charity doesn’t tell anyone about it?

My prideful response: if you all are so smart, build your own schools, feed your own countrymen. After all, Mboya’s efforts to educate Obama Sr., Ochieng Sr., and hundreds of other Kenyans back in the day seem to have borne fruit for the individual students and their American offspring, but it didn’t do much for the country that it was intended to benefit.

"You" are merely trying to embarrass the Senator. The urge in your puny mind is to convince the world that Barack is a skinflint who cares nothing about helping his own brother out of a quagmire.

That’s correct. And after the discovery of the existence of the American aunt, this image is reinforced--not because of D'Souza's actions but because of Obama's.

You are telling Americans that the man seeking their votes is a sadist whose entire paternal clan in Kenya is perishing from hunger.

Years ago, in my ignorance, I asked my father why the poor in Nairobi’s slums don’t have indoor plumbing. He never answered me. Now I think that I know the ‘whys’ of both. And, more than ever, I'm inclined to agree with Kenyan economist James Shikwati: the kindest thing that the West could do for Africa is to cease all aid. It would be a great compliment to the competence of all the ethnic groups on the continent.

I’ll post my decision next week and inform the donors.

Through the Looking Glass

Max Taves of LA Weekly interviews me about my parallel/mirror life with Obama and about my effort to save the school in the senator's father's hometown and named in his honor. The profile is pretty accurate, though I don't recall saying that I "worry about my bills." And I have never met my father face-to-face, though we do talk by phone and e-mail.

I've already been called irresponsible by an Obama supporter for "naming" the school "Barack Obama's School" and advised that I needed to "re-think" that decision. I received no apology for all the erroneous assumptions in the friendly advice, however, when I pointed out that it was the residents of Nyang'oma-Kogelo, Kenya who dubbed their secondary school 'Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School.'

(And, yes, I hate the picture. The bougainvillea were swelling me up yeah, I've gotten fatter since this latest bout of not-smoking--ten months.)

(Thanks to Michael Bowen, Patrick Frey and Jill Stewart)

Al Qaeda's 1998 Attacks on Africa

Ten years ago today--using the time-tested truck-bomb method--Islamists blew up the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The toll: in Nairobi 213 dead—of that number 12 were American; in Dar es Salaam 11 dead—all Africans—and 85 wounded.

From the Kenya attack, over 4500 were wounded, 150 were blinded.

From the Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower:

Beyond the obvious goal of calling attention to the existence of al Qaeda, the point of the bombings was vague and confusing. The Nairobi operation was named after the Holy Kaaba in Mecca; the Dar es Salaam bombing was called al-Aqsa, after the mosque in Jerusalem; neither had an obvious connection to the American embassies in Africa. Bin Laden put forward several explanations for the attack. He initially said that the sites had been target because of the “invasion” of Somalia; then he described an American plan to partition Sudan, which he said was hatched in the embassy in Nairobi. He also told his followers that the genocide in Rwanda had been planned inside the two American embassies.

That would be funny if it didn't make me nauseous.

Muslims all over the world greeted the bombings with horror and dismay. The deaths of so many people, most of them Africans, many of them Muslims, created a furor. Bin Laden said that the bombings gave the Americans a taste of the atrocities that Muslims had experienced. But to most of the world and even to some members of al-Qaeda, the attacks seemed pointless, a showy act of mass murder with no conceivable effect on American policy except to provoke a massive response.

But that, as it turned out, was exactly the point.

Wright says that bin Laden had been trying to get the Americans to come and get him in Afghanistan, figuring that, if he killed enough Americans we would. (We know what happened afterward and what is still happening, but I don’t want to make this post too much about Americans.)

I contend that there was another point. Al Qaeda did it for the same reason they do everything else. Evil is almost always its own point.

Kenya’s Daily Nation has, of course, been commemorating the attacks.

Nairobi’s Day of Horror Recalled

Nairobi. 10:40am. Friday August 7, 1998. First came two explosions, then the mighty sonic boom, the ground shook and the skies over a corner of the city darkened with a mushroom cloud.

As the smoke and dust cleared, tonnes of paper thrown up by the blast wafted lazily over the city, coming down in slow pirouettes that belied the force of the explosion that had sent them into the sky. By the time New York got its 9/11, Nairobi already had its August 7, a date of horror etched in the collective memory of millions of Kenyans.

When the dust had cleared 213 innocents, nearly all of them Kenyans, lay dead.

The target of the terrorist attack, the US embassy, a stout, solid, fortress by the Haile Sellasie Avenue-Moi Avenue-Kenya Railways roundabout, was still standing defiant, but a mere shell gutted into the insides. Twelve American and 31 other embassy staff, nearly all Kenyans, lost their lives.

Adjacent to the embassy building, the taller 7-story Ufundi Cooperative House [containing a secretarial college], not constructed to withstand bomb attacks, had crumbled to the ground.

(Emphasis mine.)

Sound familiar?

More:

How the Nairobi Terror Attack was Planned

Victims: Only the Scars Have Died
“We forgive you, but we have not forgotten.”

Personally speaking, I learned quickly that none of my immediate family had been injured. Though I had never met any of them at the time, this was a great relief to me. The American response to the attack, however, made my then ongoing transformation from Democrat to Republican irreversible.

Many things were galling about the attacks, but one was the fact that Africans—Kenyans and Tanzanians—weren’t even the targets of the bombings but took most of the casualties. (This was also the case with the 2002 Mombasa attacks; Israelis were the targets.)

To quote myself:

I liken [al-Qaeda attitude toward the terror attacks in Africa] to a demolition company destroying a building. Who cares if the "vermin" in it are destroyed along with the building? For that is the cultural view that [many? most?] Arab Muslims hold for blacks, even for those blacks who are foolish enough to believe that being Muslims themselves will save them. Sudan, anyone?

At any rate, my heart goes out to those who are still feeling the physical, emotional and spiritual pain caused by those attacks. At least one of your American friends is thinking of you today, Kenya, and I know for a fact that I am far from alone.

Berlin Airlift

Today is the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Berlin Airlift. I wrote a piece for Pajamas Media commemorating the anniversary. Check it out!

The Trans-Saharan Slave Trade

I wish that I would have found the following a couple of months ago. However, there's no time like the present.

Here's a little something for those who would urge God to damn America for her real and perceived sins against her citizens who are of black African descent.

The worst, most inhumane and most diabolical institution of the black African slave trade was initiated, refined, perpetrated and implemented by the Mohammedan Arabs and later aided and abetted by the black converts to Mohammedan Islam.

I predict that, as usual, the two subcultures--those of denial of facts and of political correctness will attack us without once disproving a single statement and/or conclusion that we make.

--John Alembillah Azumah, author of The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue

Obama Birth Rumors

Ed Morrissey asks:

Was Barack Obama born in Hawaii or somewhere else, or did he just change a name?

Ed cites Jim Geraghty, who thinks that the Obama Campaign’s failure to produce the candidate’s birth certificate has caused these rumors to fly:

1. Obama was not born in the US, but in Kenya.
2. Obama’s middle name was Mohammed, not Hussein (but then why change it to another Arabic name?)
3. His real first name is “Barry”.

Of these, only one is serious.

My first instinct is to call Bravo Sierra on this story, since it’s most likely an ever-mutating product of the malignant imagination of a guy named Kenneth Lamb who saw fit to make up lies about my tribe—the same tribe that Obama stems from. Lamb claims that our tribe is an Arab tribe. Yes, really. The goal in creating this fiction is to refute the idea that Obama, whose mother was a white American, is a “legal” “African American,” whatever the heck that is. (I suppose that, by this logic, I am half “African American” since my mother is a black American.)

See the guy on the right? That’s my father, journalist Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan Luo like the senior Barack Obama. The two were also friends (something which Father's beginning to rue since he's being inundated by American media requests of late). Does he look like an Arab to you?

Obama has produced so many gaffes—both about his personal life and about American history—that I’m beginning to wonder whether anything he says is something which he hasn’t learned rote from a script. However, allowing this fantasy about the Luo tribe--one born of ignorance regarding African countries--to mix in with real, live concrete issues regarding a prospective Barack Obama presidency hurts the opposition to that candidacy. That it p*sses me off is beside the point.

Make no mistake, Lamb’s novella is the origin of these rumors.

Proper Burial

Instapundit, who has this photo up today, taken in a Tennessee town

jokes that

I thought we'd at least have until the Democrats took the White House before these things started popping up.

If those who empty it are intending to give unserviceable flags (torn, dirty, stained) a proper funeral--by ceremonially burning them--then the container is a good thing.

It's far better and less upsetting than finding them in a dumpster or a trash heap.

Glenn knows this undoubtedly, but I thought it needed to be said for those who don't and who may be sending him nasty-grams this second.

UPDATE: Some folks thoght that Glenn's picture was a Photoshop creation, so he posts another view of the "mail" box with its surroundings visible.

Interesting how different human perspective is on the idea of flag disposal. Those who knew little about flag protocol thought that the photo was fake; those who know more about it found the concept entirely plausible.

Odyssey

Tom Mboya’s passion*—to provide the ‘elite’ of his nation with Western education so that they might come back home and build on the home turf—has borne some unforeseen fruit, both large and small.

Because of Obama’s prominence, Mboya’s endeavor has recently received the type of publicity of which the latter could have only dreamed back in the late fifties. However, it seems that, whether in America or Africa, Mboya operated by Jesus Christ’s axiom that when one asks, he/she shall receive. And it appears that Obama and I have many earthly beings to thank for the providence of being born American. One such being is American expatriate Gloria Hagberg.

From a 2005 profile:

Resting on a couch at the United Kenya Club in Nairobi, 92-year-old Gloria Hagberg is a lady at peace with the heavens and all below.

She came to Kenya 50 years ago and fell in love with the country and its people. Now in the sunset of her life, she spends her day going through scrapbooks and photo albums of her rich career as an educationist.

And she is not about to leave Kenya. "This is the only home I know," she insists.

Her best memories are of the time when she and her late husband, Gordon Hagberg, helped about 5,000 Kenyan students go to America for studies in what is commonly known as the airlifts between 1958 and 1962.

Among them were two future vice presidents of Kenya, the late Dr Josephat Karanja and Professor George Saitoti.

Others who passed through her hands later became senior politicians and some members of the Cabinet. They include Arthur Magugu, Dr Adhu Awiti, Samuel Adoyo and Kimani wa Nyoike.

She also nurtured journalists Hilary Ng’weno and Philip Ochieng before they took up their scholarships in the US. [SNIP]

Her role in the airlift project was to conduct pre-airlift classes for students who had qualified for the scholarships and to make their flight arrangements.

The classes were mainly to introduce them to America and counsel them on how to make it as students in a foreign country.

"It was not as easy as it sounds," she recalls. "Many of them had never been to Nairobi, let alone fly to New York." [SNIP]

Her husband’s memoirs capture the hectic moments in the following words: "Students flocked to the office where Sumat Patel and J.K. Jani were coping with the restless line. These two gentlemen were among the many who gave their time and money to get the airlift off the ground. Their energetic resourcefulness was later to be described as something akin to a miracle by the time the third airlift had safely delivered its passengers across the Atlantic."

But to get the job done, they were able to get tickets at fares that were half of the normal amount.

Gloria recalls a 5,000-plus crowd gathering at the airport that evening. They were members of family and well-wishers who had come to witness the historic day. She, her husband and the late Cabinet ministers Mboya and Gikonyo Kiano stood with the crowd to wave Kwaheri.

"The excitement was so high you could feel it in the air. The crowds were cheering and dancing, almost causing a stampede at the waving bay. Security people had to intervene to stop the frenzied crowds from jumping into the restricted area," she remembers.

Two days later the students arrived in New York flying via London. Gloria had already confirmed their bookings at the Hotel Martinique on 32nd Street at Broadway. Here the travel-weary students found tens of journalists waiting to report the event.

"I was so delighted to receive a cable that the students had landed safely in the US and were headed for their respective colleges. My husband and I went for a special dinner to celebrate the achievement." [SNIP]

Gloria recalls the second airlift taking place in September 1960. This one had 148 students who she had taken through her pre-flight course. They arrived in New York on September 13 aboard two DC-4 aircrafts. Fifty compatriots from the first airlift were at hand to meet the new arrivals.[SNIP]

Within 10 days of the arrival of the second group came a further 242 students.

"It was like a military invasion with hundreds of Kenyans landing in the US every week," she recalls with delight.

(Emphasis mine.)

How about that? I highlighted the instances of flight to show that, unless one is looking at a roster of passengers, it would be easy to confuse who was on which flight. Additionally, there were many, many people who provided resources--financial and otherwise--to bring these students to America. I tip my not-wig to them and, of those gone on, to their memories.

My source wondered whether Mrs. Hagberg was still alive. As of February, she was indeed--riding out the turmoil in her adopted homeland in relative safety (scroll down). February 1 was her 95th birthday.

I wonder how many Americans there are who are descended from these “invaders.” Obama and I may be the most narcissistic ones, but it's not possible that we're the only ones.

(A most heartfelt thanks to Buy Danish)

*Part of the airlift timeline is here.

Back to Africa Again

The airlift which brought my father--Philip Ochieng--and Barack Obama, Sr. to America is back in the news again. Originally discussed this time last year after Obama, Jr.'s Selma speech--which saw the senator curiously attribute some of the events surrounding his 1961 birth to the 1964 Selma march—Obama asserted that the airlift in question was due to the efforts of John F. Kennedy. Observers threw the BS flag on that as well since Obama had already been conceived by the time JFK was sworn in as POTUS.

However, when I found out that my father had been on the same plane as Obama Senior, I did some digging and discovered that JFK had indeed been responsible for an airlift of students from Kenya before he became president. An op-ed written by my father in 2004 seemed to confirm this.

Like Obama Senior, I too went to the US on the famous Tom Mboya Airlift of 1959 [when hundreds of Kenyan students were given scholarships to American universities]. I first met Obama Senior in Tom Mboya's Nairobi office [Mboya was then the secretary general of the Kenya Federation of Labour]. Obama and I met up again on returning to Nairobi and remained drinking buddies for many years.

(Emphasis mine. That will be important in a moment.)

Note that my father calls the trip the ‘Tom Mboya Airlift.’ However, the 1960 article in TIME magazine calls it the ‘Kennedy Airlift.’ At first I chalked the difference up to cultural pride--of course, each nation would want to give their countryman the credit. After that, it seemed that the bit of history was settled. (Obama was on his own as far as the Selma issue went, however.)

Then, last week, I received an email from a gentleman named Gregory Gelembiuk who provided yet more info about the airlift. Mr. Gelembiuk contended that Senator Obama was deliberately lying about the Kennedy connection because the Ivy-educated senator was more used to doing in-depth research than I am, because he has access to more information than I do and because the senator has a history of, shall we say, selective recall. All are true but I was merely going by what my father had said.

Later in the week I received an email from the Washington Post’s Michael Dobbs who asked about the same information, so I provided him with my father’s email address and at least one link, courtesy of Mr. Gelembiuk. I don’t know whether either was useful to Mr. Dobbs, but today’s Post contains his piece entitled “Obama Overstates Kennedys' Role in Helping His Father.”

Contrary to Obama's claims in speeches in January at American University and in Selma last year, the Kennedy family did not provide the funding for a September 1959 airlift of 81 Kenyan students to the United States that included Obama's father. According to historical records and interviews with participants, the Kennedys were first approached for support for the program nearly a year later, in July 1960. The family responded with a $100,000 donation, most of which went to pay for a second airlift in September 1960. [SNIP]

A more accurate version of the story would begin not with the Kennedys but with a Kenyan nationalist leader named Tom Mboya, who traveled to the United States in 1959 and 1960 to persuade thousands of Americans to support his efforts to educate a new African elite. Mboya did not approach the Kennedys for financial support until Obama Sr. was already studying in Hawaii.

So the problem is that there was more than one sortie in the airlift and Obama--and Hot Air's Allahpundit and myself--got one of the Kennedy-funded trips confused with earlier ones which had different funding--an easy thing to do since none of us were born yet when the events in question occurred. Personally I didn't even know about the airlifts until Obama mentioned it last year and I asked my father about it afterward.

Compounding the confusion, my father innocently bunches all of the sorties together when telling of the endeavor in his 2004 column. He speaks of hundreds of students being the beneficiaries of Mboya’s idea rather than the eighty-one students in the singular year of 1959, among them himself and Obama Sr.

In 1959 Mboya coordinated an “airlift” of 81 Kenyan students to the United States to attend college, and shortly after attending the “Africa Freedom Dinner,” Mboya wrote [Dr. Martin Luther] King requesting financial assistance for a Kenyan student who was to enter Tuskegee Institute in the fall. In an 8 November 1959 letter to the New York Times Mboya explained: “Nothing constitutes a greater contribution to the struggle against poverty, disease and political subjection in Africa more than the contribution made towards our peoples’ educational advancement.” With the help of the African American Students Foundation and its sponsors, Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, and Sidney Poitier, Mboya raised sufficient funds to cover the students’ travel expenses.

Believing that Africans and African Americans shared “a common struggle” against colonialism and segregation King took an active interest in the education of African students. He encouraged college presidents in the United States to expand financial aid options available to Africans. He arranged for the Montgomery Improvement Association and other Montgomery organizations to fund five Kenyan students to study at American universities and pledged the SCLC and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to fund the living expenses for Kenyan student, Nicholas Raballa, who was admitted to Tuskegee Institute.

(It is interesting to know that Mboya went to the black glitterati of the era for help and good to know that they came through. Upon discovering this new information, I briefly considered being nicer to Mr. Belafonte from now on, then discarded the notion. After all, who knows who else will be discovered to have been responsible for Obama's and my presence in this country?)

The bottom line is this: I dissent from Misters Gelembiuk, Dobbs and Morrissey in that I think the discrepancies in the airlift story are an innocent mistake on Obama's part. Of course I understand why they do not believe this-- they're thinking of all the not-so-innocent mistakes on topics large and small which the good senator has made. I, too, would have come to a similar conclusion if it weren't for the mitigating circumstances which I've highlighted. But "I ain't mad at" the above gentlemen if they're not convinced.

See, that's the problem with chronic dissembling. Even when you make an honest-to-goodness oopsie, no one believes that it stems from honesty or goodness.

[Re-edited]

How "Blackness" Came To Be

Regarding my post “Is Obama Black or White? Yes,” reader Salt Lick has a few questions—the answers of which I think would be useful for all to see. For clarity’s sake, the lines from the original post are block-quoted, Salt Lick’s questions or comments are in bold and my answers/comments are in normal font. Let’s have at it, shall we?

Hello Baldi --

I've been reading and rereading your post for over a half-hour, trying to understand your central point. It seems to me that you are not defending Sinbad's attitude so much as asking his critics to consider the reasons underlying it. You are mostly annoyed that "some" people are saying Obama's race shouldn't matter because it's convenient for them, not because they really want to ignore his race (whatever that is). Am I right?

Yes. I do think that some whites feel slighted because Obama calls himself black--either because they "love" him so much and view the self-ID as exclusionary from them. Or it's another straw for the camel's back, as it were (more about this in the next post). I've seen some say that he's racist for calling himself 'black.' On the contrary, he's merely following tradition--not an obscure seldom-seen one, but one one that's in practice everyday in 2008 among black Americans without any second thought.

I'm still not sure, however, I understand some of your specific points:

Glenn Reynolds adds this point from one of his readers:

"Let me see if I've got this straight: a white man is not allowed to portray a half-white man (Barack Obama) on SNL, but a black man is?"

Glenn’s other reader must not have been paying attention to the racial conventions in this country; conventions which have existed since the country has existed.

But a reader could be quite familiar with those conventions and still ask the question, right? Regardless of history, the question can stand by itself.

On the contrary, a question like that cannot be separated from the history of how race is thought of by those who were upset—like Sinbad--that Obama was portrayed by a white man. They were upset because to them, Obama is not a white man, but a black one. (His partial whiteness makes no difference to them because almost all black Americans have some white ancestry.) To see why this is so, the history must be spelled out and considered.

As for question posed by Glenn’s reader, implicit in it is the erroneous assumption that Barack Obama—or others like him--would be considered white just as often as he would be considered black. The fact that he/she makes that assumption says to me that he/she is unfamiliar with how racial conventions have gone in this country for generations (as I said) or is ignoring it. The person can certainly ask the question, however, and I can critique it--which certainly doesn't hinder the former.

The point is that we cannot have it all ways. Either he’s a) black or b) white or c) half-black and half-white or d) an American and who-gives-a-damn about his ethnicity. I’m sure that a lot of us would pick option ‘d’ or even ‘b.’ However, let’s quit pretending that those who would pick option ‘a’ aren’t merely following a well-known American tradition.

Who do you see as "those who would pick option 'a'"?

Those who are following the racial conventions as they have been followed up until recently.

Do you think that's OK?

Sure. I did say that later in the post.

Does the acceptability of that choice vary depending on their race?

Probably. I do think that younger white Americans are largely unfamiliar with how it got to be so that persons with half or less African ancestry got to be considered black. Therefore when this group observes these mini-dramas like the SNL controversy and wonders why Obama calls himself black and not something else and why black Americans view this as a given, many of the former chalk it up to black racism--which is understandable if the historical context isn’t provided.

If one wants to break with that tradition, the first step is to be honest about it.

I'm not clear whether you think we should break with "that tradition" because you later write "...race rules fast enough for some; but that isn't due to the same white supremacy that gave birth to the rules. It's just the way we've always thought about ourselves and those who are usually members of our family."

So it's OK to see yourself as "black" or "white" as long as it's not because of "the convention?"

I said: “That many white people don't want to follow [the old racial conventions] any more is most definitely progress.” I also said: “If some [mixed-race persons] want to think of themselves in a different manner--like, say, Tiger Woods or one of my nieces or one of Glenn's nephews--I say fantastic; if not, also fantastic.” Therefore, I’m of the who-gives-a-damn school of thought on the matter. It's not a matter of "should."

However, it is here where I probably could have provided more clarity, so I’ll give it a shot. An assumption: Glenn’s reader seemed taken aback that some blacks believe that a person who is in reality, half-black and half-white should be considered black and that, therefore only a black actor should portray him and not a white one. That reader believed the attitude to stem from a black racism that is a mirror image to white supremacy--another assumption on my part. Such racism does exist, of course, but I contended that this isn't an example of it, but “just the way we've always thought about ourselves and those who are usually members of our family” and provided the historical context--about which a lot of young white people seem not to know. This isn’t an OK/not-OK issue; it just is.

All I’m trying to do is to correct a misconception about this subject—a misconception about its origin.

I think that black people have, for the greater part, willingly gone along with the convention. That many white people don't want to follow it any more is most definitely progress. But two things should be kept in mind:

1) Until relatively recently, white persons--in America at least--have always decided who was considered 'white'; IOW they made the rules in that area. ...don't pretend as if another rule isn't being made by "whites" that "blacks" have to follow or suffer some sort of censure.

That seems to say that the relatively recent notion of doing away with race as important is only a white idea.

I made no value judgment as to the idea’s importance; rather to the decision of when it’s time to change and to the identity of the *decision-makers.* Yes it’s a bit of pride; not the racial kind per se but the standard issue.

Black Americans have had their societal role defined by whites and other Americans from the beginning. In the bad old days, when a black person stepped out of his fixed role, he was “censured” harshly. Nowadays other Americans want to redefine that role, but if some black persons want to go with the old definitions, they are censured infinitely less harshly, but censured nonetheless--told that they’re being racist and not moving fast enough. I'm saying this: until all racial classifications are repudiated altogether, that a person should decide for herself on the matter of self-ID.

2) That the rules are to be dropped now seems a tad convenient.

And the rejoinder from "others" is that it seems a tad convenient that some want to hold on to the old rule, which used to be abhorrent, but is useful now.

Who said anything about any of this abhorrent? Abhorrent to whom? Useful to whom and how? I see inferences not implied by this blogger. I explained to you some things that have always been taken for granted by black people until recently--like the last ten years. Are you calling me a liar?

Isn't this the drag on all social progress -- old grudges and resentments drag it down.

Considering one's self 'black' as one has always done is a grudge now? Some sort of resentment? My mother has lighter skin that Obama and has hazel eyes to boot (Obama's are brown). It’s interesting to know that it’s nursing some sort of “old grudge and resentment” that we consider her black. I've heard it remarked that the concept of black always conjures negatively notions, but you, sir, have taken it to a new level.

Everyone wants "justice." Because anything else is unfair.

I am reminded of a two-year-old post at Wizbang which featured the Conservative Brotherhood—an informal blog alliance composed of black conservative bloggers--in a positive context. Some of the commenters, however, contended that we CB members were “holding ourselves back” by even congregating or that we were asserting that our writing was better because we were black! IOW they were using their own preconceived notions to define the group rather that letting us define ourselves. They were letting their stereotypes about blackness and of what it meant when black Americans chose to form alliances with each other get in the way of what any of us were saying. It was almost as if they weren't even seeing the word 'conservative.'

When I write here, I’m not doing so in a vacuum. Each post may be on a singular subject but, after having written for a bit, I would like to think that regular readers would have at least some sort of idea of how I think; of what is important to me and what isn’t. That you would think that “justice” and “fairness” were somehow a part of this says to me that you’re not taking me as an individual blogger, but are taking my measure using some other standard. With that in mind, let my say this:

I do not give a rat’s hairy backside about “justice” or "fairness” with regard to this topic.

The concepts I’ve put down here exist. Reality exists and all I’m exhorting others to do is to accept it, rather than making up their context-free version of it. If “some” cannot do that without imbuing some less-than-savory motives on my part, then I’ll have to get over it because I've long accepted that life is manifestly unfair. If you don't embrace anything else I say, embrace that.

Your Most Humble and Obedient Servant

I take my not-wig off to you. I can be...harsh..with those who disagree with me--especially when they're putting words in my mouth. Thanks for the opportunity to clarify my points.

Is Obama Black or White? Yes (UPDATE)

Today it’s all about race. Again. This time it’s Sinbad jumping into the fray, complaining that a white man has been continuously slotted to portray Barack Obama on Saturday Night Live. ::::cough::: Eddie Murphy :::cough::: Whatever.

However, in his commentary on the subject, Glenn Reynolds adds this point from one of his readers:

Let me see if I've got this straight: a white man is not allowed to portray a half-white man (Barack Obama) on SNL, but a black man is?

Glenn’s other reader must not have been paying attention to the racial conventions in this country; conventions which have existed since the country has existed. Rightly or wrongly, a person who has a certain amount of African ancestry has been considered black and, during the slavery and Jim Crow years and many of the the mere forty-plus year beyond that, treated accordingly. The short version? Any child gotten upon a black slave by any white man was still considered black and therefore also a slave. (And when one thinks about this dispassionately, it makes sense financially.) Later on, post-bellum, the driving force for the convention was white supremacy--keeping the race pure. (Some folks refer to this as the ‘one-drop rule.’ However, it would not apply to Obama since he has a great deal more that one drop of black African ancestry. It would be more applicable to someone like my grandmother.)

Now I'm all for ignoring conventions which have white supremacy as progenitor, as I'm sure Glenn is. But some folks act as if this concept originated with black people. And they also act as if no one would have turned a hair had Obama presented himself to the American electorate as white—that is, making no mention of race whatsoever unless asked. (Of course that would mean that Mrs. O. would have to pipe down and that they would have to belong to a different church, but that's beside the point.)

The point is that we cannot have it all ways. Either he’s a) black or b) white or c) half-black and half-white or d) an American and who-gives-a-damn about his ethnicity. I’m sure that a lot of us would pick option ‘d’ or even ‘b.’ However, let’s quit pretending that those who would pick option ‘a’ aren’t merely following a well-known American tradition.

If one wants to break with that tradition, the first step is to be honest about it.

UPDATE: Thanks to Glenn for the link and the comment:

I'm well aware of the one-drop rule. What's changed, though, is who seems most interested in enforcing it.

Again, Obama doesn't qualify. Additionally, I think that black people have, for the greater part, willingly gone along with the convention. That many white people don't want to follow it any more is most definitely progress. But two things should be kept in mind:

1) Until relatively recently, white persons--in America at least--have always decided who was considered 'white'; IOW they made the rules in that area. (I'm told that those of Irish and Italian descent weren't always part of the "club.") Many mixed-raced Americans of African descent--which means darn near every black American including me--aren't subscribing to the new race rules fast enough for some; but that isn't due to the same white supremacy that gave birth to the rules. It's just the way we've always thought about ourselves and those who are usually members of our family. If some want to think of themselves in a different manner--like, say, Tiger Woods or one of my nieces or one of Glenn's nephews--I say fantastic; if not, also fantastic. But don't pretend as if another rule isn't being made by "whites" that "blacks" have to follow or suffer some sort of censure.

2) That the rules are to be dropped now seems a tad convenient. Why not with Colin Powell or Julian Bond or dozens of other famous visibly mixed-raced Americans of African descent?

More later. Maybe.

Blast From the Past

Today is a day of violence. It's also an anniversary of what would have been a significant attack on our military. Instead the 1970 incident turnout to be a mere "work accident."

Three members of the radical activist group known as the Weather Underground, Diana Oughton, Ted Gold and Terry Robbins, blew themselves straight to hell when the bomb they were building, which was intended to blow up a dance at Fort Dix, exploded in an otherwise quiet New York neighborhood.

Rest in Pieces.

Oughton had been the girlfriend of fellow WU member Williams Ayers--the same William Ayers who, during a interview intended to promote his book Fugitive Days (sorry, no Amazon link for that from me), spouted off about blowing up the Pentagon. The interview "coincidentally" appeared in the New York Times on the morning of September 11, 2001 (and some say that there's no God).

This is, indeed, the same William Ayers who has an admittedly tenuous connection to Barack Obama. The problem with that connection is this, however: it cannot be considered as just another isolated fact. It cannot be view as a thing which has no relation to all of the other things which are just a little "off" about Senator Obama.

Again, I urge all of you who are considering voting for the senator to be discerning enough to know what to take in consideration and know what to throw out when it comes to evaluating the package of policies, personality and history in which Barack Obama presents himself to us, the American electorate.

Is that too much to ask?

(Thanks to Ace Of Spades HQ)

UPDATE: More violence. Don't forget--this is still his world.

Why Ask Why?

Over at the blog iSteve, Steve Sailer has been blogging Obama for some time. He happened to come upon the work I've done regarding the situation in Kenya, featured it and, as a result, I'm getting a nice little traffic upswing. Thanks and I take my not-wig off to you, sir.

Steve finds it fascinating that Obama and I managed to develop polar opposite political philosophies while having frighteningly similar (but obviously not the same) origins. But long-time readers of this blog will know that our political philosophies were not so opposite once upon a time.

I don't know why I went one way and Obama went the other. Some might think that his Ivy League education is the factor. Perhaps. However, I suspect that there are three additional issues which make up part of the difference: 1) my upbringing was not foreign (his was partially), 2) I grew up without the type of identity crises which the senator seems to have experienced* and 3) my parents are still around for me to argue with.

But, of course, these factors by themselves or even considered as a whole don't necessarily lead to conservatism. Sometimes the answers to such questions aren't immediately at hand. Sometimes the answer is--Grace.

[Re-edited with more caffeine]

*IMO, this is due to his being biracial. Now, careful. I'm not saying that all--or even most--biracial persons experience this. But his biracial-ness coupled with the fact that both parents essentially abandoned him had to cause him to ask "who am I" for quite some time.